The Digital Society Project (DSP) aims to answer some of the most important questions surrounding interactions between the internet and politics. Created using the award-winning V-Dem infrastructure, the DSP dataset is the product of a global survey of hundreds of country and area experts, covering virtually all countries in the world from 2000 to 2020 It provides a set of 35 new indicators covering such topics as:
- online censorship
- polarization and politicization of social media
- misinformation campaigns
- coordinated information operations
- foreign influence in and monitoring of domestic politics.
The primary goal of this project is to provide high-quality, publicly available, data describing the intersection between politics and social media. While there is great demand for such data, reliable measures of key indicators, with wide global and temporal coverage, are largely unavailable.
Academics can use these data to understand how people use social media as a political tool and to explore how political institutions and social media use interact. Policymakers can use these data to, among a host of applications, better understand how, and where, to intervene to curb internet-driven political violence, reduce electoral manipulation, and enhance government accountability.
Header images (left to right):
2005 Network Map of the Internet (courtesy of The Opte Project [CC BY 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)] via Wikimedia Commons)
Tahrir Square, February 9, 2011 (courtesy of Jonathan Rashad [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] via Wikimedia Commons)
Social Media Buttons (courtesy of Today Testing (For derivative) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] via Wikimedia Commons)
