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Understanding the information landscape in a country is foundational to the design and implementation of an information integrity strategy. This activity describes the conduct of an in-country information landscape assessment to map the information ecosystem relating to elections and disinformation/hate speech. The ultimate goals of this is to understand the dynamics and risks in the country, which will support the design of an appropriate strategy that will, in turn, support the conduct of peaceful and credible elections.
The assessment may include various data-collection methods, including monitoring, investigation and consultations with a broad range of stakeholders. Several approaches may be required, depending on the specific scope and needs.
This tool serves as a starting point for many of the information integrity workstream-related programmatic activities included in this knowledge hub and aims to provide the required data to inform planning and implementation decisions. In turn, the design of a specific assessment is informed by the requirements that the assessment is intended to serve and by the needs, to be defined a priori.
There are a number of complex underlying concerns that assessors may seek to understand, though they will vary depending upon the country, and the ability to answer them will often be limited. These include the relationship between the information landscape and various measures, such as the degree of polarization, election participation rates, level of freedom of expression and trust in institutions—especially the Election Management Body (EMB)—and ultimately the risk to credible and peaceful elections.
This information landscape assessment involves the collection and analysis of data on disinformation and hate speech narratives to produce evidence-based reports and assessments. While the initial areas of review will be refined depending on the country’s specific needs, the following may constitute overarching inputs:
The assessment may be conducted using a variety of data collection methods, including some or all of the following: interview/consultations, monitoring of the online and offline media using social network analysis methods, content discovery and social listening tools.
The following deliverables may constitute part of the assessment assignment:
Experts and/or organizations that have expertise in conducting similar exercises in other country contexts, and with access to bespoke software may be preferred candidates for conducting an information landscape assessment. Nonetheless, understanding context-specific sensitivities and how information is sought and shared in that particular context adds value.
The information landscape assessment is by default a tool to determine context-specific concerns to inform future activities. Consultations with the broadest set of national actors involved in both the electoral process and the information landscape allow context-specific considerations to be uncovered.
Part of the assessment should be to determine the various relevant societal components and how they are vulnerable, or party to, information pollution. Research indicates that age is a significant factor in the sharing or acceptance of information pollution, making disaggregating data according to age key. The assessment should prioritize concerns of marginalized groups in a specific context, including but not limited to women.
The assessment will be partly informed by stakeholder interviews to ensure that the assessment clearly captures the roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders in the information landscape. The finalization of the assessment could be marked by the organization of a workshop to discuss and validate the findings and recommendations of the assessment. This would allow all relevant stakeholders to share their views on how the activity fits within the existing landscape of activities and programmes, while facilitating a discussion around effective coordination and synergy building.
The costing will depend upon the approach being taken, including the detail of monitoring, the level of qualitative and quantitative analysis required and the longitudinal nature of the activity. These are factors that determine the level of technical expertise and technology required for the assessment.
A broad assessment that leans on qualitative information will require an expert or a small team of experts. Typically this would require support for a broad range of interactions with key stakeholders—in-person or remote. More data driven assessments may require a third-party company. In such cases, analytical and qualitative techniques remain important. A number of firms do exist and often will provide similar services to governments, international organizations and the platforms themselves. The costs for such services can be considerable.
In order for iVerify to be implemented in a particular country with support of UNDP, an assessment mission will be deployed to:
1. analyse the legal and information landscape
2. map existing initatives
4. propose partnerships and an operational structure
Digital Democracy Risk Assessment, Democracy Reporting International
The Risk Assessment is a tool for civil society organisations and other researchers to assess a country’s vulnerabilities to online manipulation around elections. The Assessment’s approach is to focus on the vulnerabilities. It does not assist users to establish the existence of adversarial manipulation campaigns, networks, or their impact. Instead, it helps users to map vulnerabilities of a country’s election ahead of the event. All resources related to the tool including the background paper, user guide, guiding questions and guidance on accessing data and social media tools can be found here
Election Watch for the Digital Age, Freedom House
Election Watch is a research initiative investigating the interplay between digital platforms and election integrity. It tracks a number of countries where elections are foreseen in the near future; ranking them according to a selection of key election-related indicators.
Preliminary Assessment of the Information landscape in Cambodia, UNDP Cambodia
This research brief, aimed to identify the influence of information sources for spreading disinformation in Cambodia and how citizens discern between credible and non-credible sources in the context of COVID-19.
Assessing the Human Rights Impact of Meta’s platform in the Philippines, Article One
To determine the degree to which Meta’s platforms may or may not have contributed to adverse human rights impacts and to mitigate the risk of further adverse impacts, Meta partnered with Article One from February to July 2020 to conduct a country-level human rights impact assessment (HRIA) of its platforms in the Philippines.
In this new report, DRI assessed gender-based violence against women politicians in Libya in the online sphere through social media monitoring. This report was published as part of the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) funded project “Firmer Ground for Advancing Women’s Participation in Libya” from October 2021 until May 2022.
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