Understanding the Digital Ecosystem: Findings from the 2019 Federal Election
Image: J-source: The Canadian Journalism Project
Centre director Taylor Owen and Dr. Elizabeth Dubois at the University of Ottawa launched the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge in April 2019, in order to examine the impacts of digital media on Canadian elections.
Through the Challenge, 18 winning projects collaborated to analyze a large-scale dataset collected from social media, online news, web, and survey data. In creating this collaboration, the goal was to map the digital ecosystem in order to support increased civic and digital literacy.
The rise of social media platforms has transformed how we produce, share and consume information. While this re-engineering of our public sphere has enabled unpresented freedom of speech and new forms of political expression and organization, it has also proven to be vulnerable to manipulation and abuse - particularly during elections. In every democratic election since the 2015 Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election, we have seen an evolution in the tools and tactics of those seeking to manipulate public discourse, as well as in to the responses from governments, activists, journalists, and scholars.
An important element of these efforts has been the mobilization of research communities seeking to better understand how the spread of information through our rapidly evolving digital public sphere shapes the character and integrity of our elections. This community, the methods it deploys and the data it uses are in a period of rapid iteration and learning. The objective of the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge was to support this community in its broad efforts to better understand both the Canadian election and this wider global phenomenon.
The Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge had three core components.
First, we held an open competition to select research projects to study the 2019 election. 18 projects were chosen by an international adjudication committee and grants were awarded in July 2019.
Second, working with the Digital Democracy Project at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University, we provided all research teams with access to online and survey data about the Canadian election.
Third, we hosted a symposium of challenge winners, policy makers and civil society to discuss their findings, summarized in this report.
This was a unique experiment in research collaboration in real time during an election. Conducting research on large-scale data sets using emerging research methods is challenging. But as we hope this report illuminates, the results are powerful. Below we summarize the initial findings of the 18 projects. Each will be publishing more detailed reports, based on our growing data set and the benefit of longer research timelines.
Ultimately, a more complete understanding of this complex digital ecosystem is required to build resilience to threats posed by increased integration of digital tools into democratic processes. We hope this report provides an initial review of this space.
