Research
The Integrity Institute’s research comes directly from the people who know platforms best—550+ trust and safety professionals from 80+ tech companies. We transform their expertise into original research, industry best practices, and policy guidance.
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Elections Integrity Best Practices Guide: Defining and Achieving Success
Elections matter, and history has demonstrated online platforms will find themselves grappling with these challenges whether they want to be or not. This guide provides companies – large or small, established or new-on-the-block – concrete details as they fully implement an elections integrity program.

Defining and Achieving Success in Elections Integrity
Elections matter, and history has demonstrated online platforms will find themselves grappling with these challenges whether they want to be or not. This guide provides companies – large or small, established or new-on-the-block – concrete details as they fully implement an elections integrity program.

Best Practices for Developing & Launching Content Policies for your Platform
Announcing a New Resource: Best Practices for Developing & Launching Content Policies for your Platform

How Much Has Social Media Affected Polarization?
Following the first published research from the 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (FIES), Tom shows that social media has probably not made a huge contribution to US polarization and how we can extrapolate estimates from the FIES to other effects of interest, specifically the aggregate impact of social media on the US over the last 20 years.

Shining a Light on Platform Transparency Best Practices
As a wave of new regulations and legislative proposals around transparency from social media platforms are being written all over the world, the Integrity Institute is releasing a new resource to provide a high-level overview of what platform transparency could look like and what it could accomplish.

Meaningful Platform Transparency to Inform Society & Prepare for Upcoming Regulations
Institute co-founder Jeff Allen presented at TrustCon in July 2023.


Focus on Features
Minimize digital harms through design, a guide for product managers and lawmakers.

The Ultimate Guide to Election Integrity! with Katie Harbath and Glenn Ellingson
It might be May 2023, but it’s never too early to start worrying about elections! 2024 is slated to be the biggest year of elections in platform history. In this Trust in Tech episode, Katie Harbath and Glenn Ellingson join the show to prepare you for the storm of elections coming in 2024.

Elections Integrity Best Practices Guide: Responsibly Supporting Elections on Online Platforms
With a wave of 65 elections across 54 countries coming in 2024, including a US presidential election, the Integrity Institute is releasing a new guide – the first in a planned series – on best practices for online companies to help better support healthy elections across platforms, particularly those who are newer or smaller.

Responsibly Supporting Elections on Online Platforms
With a wave of 65 elections across 54 countries coming in 2024, including a US presidential election, the Integrity Institute is releasing a new guide – the first in a planned series – on best practices for online companies to help better support healthy elections across platforms, particularly those who are newer or smaller.

Ranking by Engagement
Tom shares his six observations on ranking by engagement on social media platforms, especially how to understand and measure engagement as negatively related to content quality.

Insights from Data: What the Numbers Tell Us About Elections and Future of Democracy
2024 has 65 elections globally across 54 countries. We won’t see that many again until 2048. Katie Harbath and Ana Khizanishvili share what these numbers from global elections tell us about the future of democracy.

2023 Nigerian Election Misinformation Amplification Analysis
Facebook and Twitter continue to amplify misinformation in Nigeria, with Twitter’s amplification being significantly larger than Facebook’s.

Election Cycle Tracker
The Institute launched a global election cycle tracker that highlights how frequently countries hold elections and when their next ones are scheduled. This tool is part of our Elections Integrity Program, led by Katie Harbath, and was developed by Katie together with Ana Khizanishvili for Anchor Change.

Analysis of Q3 2022 WVCR
Reporting from the WSJ on internal discussions at Facebook show internally, Facebook considers the top content lists this quarter to have “no low quality content” Contrary to that, we see little change in the number of posts that fail basic media literacy checks.


2022 US Midterm Elections Misinformation Amplification Analysis
We do not see any significant difference between the overall MAF and the elections and voting MAF for Facebook and Instagram. But for Twitter, we see a significantly smaller MAF for elections and voting misinfo.

Election Integrity Program Announcement
Thanks to a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Integrity Institute will be running a program supporting the integrity of elections on social media platforms through 2024.

How Social Media Amplifies Misinformation More Than Information
Write up of our misinformation amplification analyses for the Elections Integrity Program in the New York Times.