Where do you start if you want to monitor social media during elections? To help get you started, DRI’s Madeline Brady summarizes lessons learned from five projects that covered national elections across Europe in 2019 and 2020. We dive into each project, provide examples for teams deciding on what to monitor, how to assemble a team and other critical questions.
The lessons learned from these five projects show that further steps are needed from the government, social media companies and research institutions to improve the quality of monitoring work by civil society. For example, civil society groups require clear processes to access data from companies and access to additional metrics to successfully monitor social media.
DRI is also working on other tools to address the challenges faced by social media monitoring teams, which will be available in July 2020.
This publication was made possible by the five projects carried out by ElectionWatch.EU (Austria), the ISCTE-Media Lab (Portugal), the Political Accountability Foundation (Poland), Global Focus (Romania) and Gong (Croatia), with contributions from MEMO 98 and funding from NEF-Civitates.
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