Hunger Games

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

This year-long project aims to culminate in an article to be published in an impactful peer-reviewed academic journal in post-Soviet/Eastern European/Russian studies or contemporary history field.