Evergreen

What are governments around the world doing about disinformation and misinformation? How do governments define disinformation and misinformation for the purposes of creating policy? How do states differ in approach? Is there a common set of policy “instruments” that policymakers employ in this issue area? What risks are implicated by “disinformation policies”? Researchers in academia and industry, policymakers, platform trust and safety teams, and journalists have attempted to answer these questions without the benefit of real data. To be clear, case studies, in-depth analysis, and other sources of knowledge that researchers draw on are valuable. They teach us all sorts of things about state responses to “information disorder”. The Global Disinformation Policy Database project intends to compliment these existing efforts by releasing a dataset of all known policy responses to disinformation and misinformation.

The GDPD team will collect and code laws and policies that address misinformation or disinformation. We will make these government actions comparable. We will distill the essential characteristics of disinformation policy into a coding scheme. We will then use that coding scheme to demonstrate how policies around the world vary with respect to those characteristics. Our hope is that this will enable a whole new category of research into “disinformation policy”.

Task Team Leader: Ryan Williams

If you are interested in the history of this project, please see the page linked below. We have worked hard to document the major milestones so far. And as you will see, we are all about pushing things forward. So please trust that this project will not involve any waste of your time or busywork:

https://gdil.notion.site/Evergreen-Project-History-bec40a76818a44f4a00e57073183f4f1

• Write three blog posts on three aspects of this project.
• Test and contribute to the coding infrastructure that will be used to generate the GDPD
• Identify, process, and code disinformation policies from 20% of the countries in the world (the other 80% we will save for next semester!)
• Write an end-of-semester blog post that describes one trend in the data.

• Disinformation Policy Expertise – You will learn more than you thought possible about how governments around the world are responding to, and defining, disinformation and misinformation.
• Advanced Search Strategies – You will be working with a diverse team of researchers to find and code disinformation policies. This will require a thoughtful, strategic approach to searching for sources.
• Public Scholarship – You will learn how to combine several skills like writing, data visualization, and structured analytical techniques to translate findings in the GDPD for a wider audience of policymakers and other stakeholders.

Other Skills We Will Use: Iterative research strategies like research sprints, design thinking, data manipulation and data cleaning, using AI to develop research questions and guide literature reviews, writing writing writing, knowledge and project management

Evergreen: Who We Are, What We Do, and Why
Published March 30, 2023

US Disinformation Policy in Perspective: Global Disinformation Policy Database Team Releases New White Paper
Published January 23, 2023 

Documentation as Research Design: Making Datasets Work
Published April 4, 2022