In the wake of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, it is timely to review the state of the debate about the impact of data-driven elections and to identify key questions that require academic research and regulatory response. The papers in this collection, by some of the world’s most prominent elections researchers, offer that assessment.
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Will the same cross-device technologies that track our journeys through the commercial marketplace now follow us into the polling booth?
Focusing on whether data-intensive technologies used in political campaigning are accurate and effective misses the point about their larger role in politics. This piece briefly addresses the popular question of “Does it work?” and suggests a series of questions and provocations that aim to more holistically capture the extent of tech-led
This paper shows how platforms are transient in the policies, procedures, and affordances and details the implications for politics.
This paper analyses the spread of misinformation in the context of 2018 Brazilian elections. We give a general overview of the Brazilian political context, its media ecosystem and the weaponisation of the country’s most popular messaging app, WhatsApp, as a political persuasion tool. The current architecture of the platform does not allow, once
Is the “European approach” an adequate response to the challenges of disinformation and political manipulation, especially in election periods?
This article highlights what we know about the empirical effects of data-campaigning in political campaigns and how those findings fail to live up to claims about its power.
Personalised political messaging undermines voter autonomy and the electoral process. Use of voter analytics for political communication must be regulated.
NationBuilder is a global, nonpartisan political technology firm that sells to anyone. Through a review of its use, this paper questions whether NationBuilder should sell to extremists, spammers or frauds.
This paper examines how Google Search ranked 29 junk news domains between 2016 and 2019, finding that SEO — rather than paid advertising — is the most important strategy for generating discoverability via Google Search. Google has taken several steps to combat the spread of disinformation on Search, and these strategies have been largely
