This guide is designed to help democracy practitioners better understand social media trends, content, data, and networks. By sharing lessons learned and best practices from across our global network, this guide empowers practitioners to make democracy work online by helping them understand data collection, locate the sources of malicious content, and use the tools of social media monitoring to support their objectives.

In recent years, the prevalence of disinformation, particularly through social media, and its threat to the integrity of elections have become an issue of global concern. While this space is rapidly changing and developing, a better definition of problems and terms, and a deeper understanding of the challenge that social media disinformation poses to electoral integrity are needed.

The Centre for Democracy and Development’s Election Analysis Centre (EAC) for the 2019 presidential and gubernatorial elections represented the first attempt in Nigeria at running a rigorous fact-checking process before, during and after the electoral process of both presidential and gubernatorial elections. CDD’s specific mandate was to provide a filter and check on viral stories that were demonstrably false. Or to confirm, with sources and justification, if certain events were true. To do this CDD worked in collaboration with the National Democratic Institute and the Premium Times.

In the three case study countries (Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya), NDI’s Gender, Women, and Democracy team worked with women in politics, those in civic technology and women’s rights organizations to develop a way to examine the country specific challenges facing women as they engage in online political discourse. The outcomes of the case studies confirmed that across the three countries women engaging in politics online experienced similar types of violence including insults and hate speech, embarrassment and reputational risk, physical threats, and sexualized misrepresentation.

This document outlines NDI’s programmatic approaches to addressing the threat of disinformation in the electoral context, particularly the actions citizen election observers and international observers can take to mitigate, expose, and counter disinformation. It also stresses the importance of using open election data to deter disinformation and advocacy around norms and standards to counter disinformation.

In a new brief, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) outlines how the latest generation of technology-fueled disinformation campaigns is amplifying the scourge of hate speech and offers a framework for democracy and governance practitioners to consider when designing interventions to effectively counter these dual threats.

Political campaigns need to protect themselves from hacking and often don’t know where to start. The good news is that there are a few fundamentals that can dramatically reduce the likelihood and impact of cybersecurity incidents.

As we know, disinformation is a growing and critical threat to democracy worldwide. Disinformation is spreading more rapidly and widely, and is being used to distort political discourse, spread cynicism, and distrust in governing institutions, and interfere with citizens’ abilities to make informed political decisions.