Research:DEM-Debate
This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.
The DEM-Debate project aims to examine how Wikipedia - the largest existing community governed free knowledge platform - addresses disinformation during elections.
It will gather and analyse the spread of information and potentially disinformation on Wikipedia during the 2024 European Parliament elections. It will take a close look at community content moderation practices and the legal framework for community content moderation in order to finally issue policy recommendations.
Methods
editLegal Research
edita. We will analyse the EU regulatory frameworks applicable to online disinformation during elections through doctrinal legal research (Hutchinson, 2013). They comprise of legislation (DSA, European Media Freedom Act, Regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising, and AI Act); case law of the Court of Justice of the EU interpreting this legislation; and non-binding EU acts, and standard-setting instruments (CoP on Disinformation). The EU human rights legal framework (including case law of the EU Court of Human Rights, and Council of Europe standard-setting instruments) will also be examined (EU Charter, 2012). b. Building on the above, we engage in normative legal analysis informed by how the law functions and reflects society (external perspective) (Smits, 2009). Doctrinal and normative analysis will generate forward-looking policy recommendations to ensure that EU regulatory frameworks support community-governed platforms in tackling disinformation during elections. Recommendations will target legislative reform, and broader regulatory reform, such as enforcement practices for regulators at EU and national level, and implementation measures of EU frameworks by EU MS.
Computational Analysis
editWe will analyse the digital footprints of the users in the edit history and talk pages of Wikipedia encyclopaedic entries and community spaces. We will select entries related to the EU elections (e.g. articles on the political parties and candidates) and will develop computational methods to analyse the activity, conflict and controversies around these pages over time and across countries and linguistic communities. We will inspect relevant community spaces related to content verification and moderation (e.g. internal policies related to the elections). The methods will be mostly language-agnostic, based on the analysis of interactions with techniques from data science and complex systems including social network analysis, graph mining, time series analysis. We will build on Eurecat’s experience in many areas, including for identifying controversies in Wikipedia articles through Contropedia (Borra et al, 2015), accounting for gender, emotions and community roles (Iosub et al, 2014), and monitoring community dynamics (Miquel-Ribé et al, 2022). Additional manual observation of the interaction data will provide a more accurate inspection, and shed light on content verification and moderation practices emerging from the interaction history.
Engagement
editThe Wikipedia communities will be involved to be mindful of their norms and practices from a legal and ethical perspective, and accounting for the idiosyncrasies of each community. Continuous involvement from data collection to analysis implementation, will ensure that the research benefits from their expertise to make sense of our findings, and our goals are aligned with their needs and expectations, resulting in outputs that may be useful to them.
Timeline
editThe project is scheduled to run for 18 months, began in October 2024 and will conclude in March 2026.
Budget
editThe project is financed by a grant from the European Media and Information Fund. The total budget is 391 714,00 €. Wikimedia Europe receives 177 821,00 €, the University of Amsterdam 115 881,00 € and the Eurecat Foundation 98 012,00 €