Mission
The CITAP Digital Politics Research Group is dedicated to researching and analyzing the organization and governance of technology platforms in the context of electoral politics. We seek to establish a public-facing foundation of facts related to the content and other policies of platforms, the products and services they offer, and the legal and regulatory contexts they operate in to inform public and regulatory debates. We also hope that journalists and other researchers will reference and extend these findings about how different technology platforms operate and are structured, and can use them to contextualize changes in platforms or the response of these firms to crisis.
Taken together, we hope that this research will make significant contributions to existing knowledge about these platforms. The research and journalistic communities have little systematic knowledge about how technology platforms are organized to work in institutional politics, in the United States or abroad. The research we do have is primarily focused on the content that publics see or that particular actors, such as political campaigns or media outlets, produce for platforms, not the organizational structures and governing policies that structure the potential for and availability of this content in the first place. Even further, we know little about the relationships that these technology firms have with political practitioners, campaigns and elected officials, and publishers.
As new democratic crises or issues inevitably arise, we need an evolutionary way of understanding the policies that are in place, the ways that they are interpreted, the relevant set of commercial, political, and legal considerations that shape decision-making, and changes in these platforms as they develop. We envision this research stream providing the important context for understanding how these companies navigate crises, what they can potentially do to preclude them in the future, and how they can strengthen democracy in the United States and around the world. While we start in the United States, our long term aim is to develop a set of comparative cases about the ways these firms shape electoral politics in countries with very different commercial, regulatory, and political contexts in order to understand differences in democratic outcomes.