THE INTERNET DEMOCRACY INITIATIVE
A platform for positive change in an interconnected world
The Internet Democracy Initiative studies problems that have widespread information and social media implications. This initiative provides leadership in understanding the role of the internet in structuring democracy, society, and markets.
The Imperative
How can the internet be a constructive force in society? The early days of the internet offered the promise of decentralized democratic transformation, social connection, easy access to high quality information, and a platform to diverse voices. While there are glimpses of these possibilities still, the internet today is strikingly centralized and dominated by relatively few gatekeepers, with society riven by polarization.
The bottom-up utopian vision of the 1990s has seemingly turned into a 2020s dystopia of misinformation and harassment, producing calls for aggressive top-down control by corporations and government. The objective of this initiative is to support rigorous research on the problems of the contemporary information ecosystem, and to evaluate the potential of interventions into and uses of the affordances of the internet to support connection and to empower democracy.
Spring 2025 Events
Misinformation Speaker Series
Risks and Opportunities in a Changing Social Media Landscape: A Conversation with Yael Eisenstat and Laura Edelson
March 26th, 10:30-11:30 AM
Register for the event below to join us in person at 177 Huntington Ave
Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook with Jennifer Allen
Abstract: Low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely attributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim, we introduce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18,725), crowdsourcing, and machine learning to estimate the causal effect of 13,206 vaccine-related URLs on the vaccination intentions of US Facebook users (N ≈ 233 million). We estimate that the impact of unflagged content that nonetheless encouraged vaccine skepticism was 46-fold greater than that of misinformation flagged by fact-checkers. Although misinformation reduced predicted vaccination intentions significantly more than unflagged vaccine content when viewed, Facebook users’ exposure to flagged content was limited. In contrast, mainstream media stories highlighting rare deaths after vaccination were not flagged by fact-checkers, but were among Facebook’s most-viewed stories. Our work emphasizes the need to scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content in addition to outright falsehoods. Additionally, we show that fact-checking has only limited efficacy in preventing misinformed decision-making and introduce a novel methodology incorporating crowdsourcing and machine learning to better identify misinforming content at scale.
Bio: Jenny is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. In Fall 2025, she will join NYU Stern as an Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics and a core faculty member of the Center for Social Media and Politics. She received her PhD in Management Science from MIT in 2025 and previously worked at Meta and Microsoft Research. Her research interests include misinformation, political persuasion, and crowdsourcing.
This event is part of the Speaker Series on Misinformation, co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Internet Democracy Initiative at Northeastern.
Risks and Opportunities in a Changing Social Media Landscape: A Conversation with Yael Eisenstat and Laura Edelson
Join us for a fireside chat between Yael Eisenstat and Laura Edelson as they discuss the evolving role of social media and online platforms in today’s political landscape. With digital spaces increasingly influencing public discourse, recent shifts in content moderation policies and speech regulations raise urgent questions about online safety, free expression, and the integrity of democratic processes.
Yael Eisenstat, a leading voice on technology and democracy, and Laura Edelson, an expert in platform transparency and online misinformation, will explore the implications of these changes. They will discuss the current landscape of social media and online platforms in today’s political environment, as well as the broader question of tech accountability—what do recent content and speech policy changes mean for online safety and democracy? And what does the future of tech accountability look like against this backdrop?
They will consider how emerging regulations could reshape the relationship between technology, users, and democracy, as well as how this relationship has developed over time.
Bio: Yaёl Eisenstat has spent over two decades combating extremism, polarization and anti-democratic behavior both on- and offline. She is currently The Director for Policy and Impact at Cybersecurity for Democracy, working on policy solutions for how social media and online platforms affect political discourse, public safety, and democracy. Previously, she was Vice President at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), heading the Center for Technology and Society, where she led ADL’s efforts to hold tech companies accountable for the proliferation of hate and extremism on their platforms.
Yaёl joined ADL in 2022 after a career in both public service and the tech industry, including as an intelligence officer, diplomat and special advisor to (former) Vice President Biden. She joined Facebook in 2018 as the head of global elections integrity for political ads, following several years as a vocal critic of the harms that social media has inflicted on democracy and societies worldwide. After leaving Facebook six months later, she spoke openly about the company’s inability to meet its responsibility to secure elections, and she has continued to push for changes in the tech industry ever since.
This event is part of the Speaker Series on Misinformation, co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Internet Democracy Initiative at Northeastern.
Misinformation Speaker Series: Skylar Johnson
April 14, 2025
Stay tuned for more details!
Misinformation Speaker Series: Naomi Oreskes
April 21, 2025
Stay tuned for more details!
Misinformation Speaker Series: Renee Diresta
Stay tuned for more details!
Event Recap:
COMPUTATION + JOURNALISM SYMPOSIUM
October 2024
The Computation + Journalism Symposium is a space for anyone working at, or curious about, the intersections of computation and journalism. This includes practicing journalists, independent data storytellers, computational social scientists, artists, digital humanities scholars, cartographers, and others. It has been hosted in prior years at Stanford, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, Columbia, ETH Zurich, and Univ. of Miami. Watch the event on our Youtube channel.
What we do
Collaborating across Northeastern’s interdisciplinary networks
The IDI is developing a clearinghouse of best practices and algorithms, and building a resource set for organizations around the world interested in defending democracy and its institutions.
Creating next-gen resources for industry and community
The Internet Democracy Initiative, building our NSF internet observatory, will study problems that have widespread information and social media implications.
Building a more equitable, fair, and representative future.
The IDI will catalyze a multi-disciplinary community at Northeastern, including through nascent teams in Oakland and London