Research Coordination Network: Democracy in the Networked Era

Summary

In May 2024, the NYU Center for Social Media & Politics hosted the inaugural event of a new Research Coordination Network (RCN): Democracy in the Networked Era. With the support of the NSF’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaT-C) program, this network was formed with the goal of fostering an interdisciplinary exchange to advance research on the online information ecosystem, including important goals for the field moving forward, the types of infrastructure needed to support this work, and methods for translating insights from the research community to policymakers and vice versa. 

Our first research meeting focused on The Digital Information Environment & Global Elections in 2024 and brought together scholars from computational social science, data science, human-computer interaction, and computer science, among other disciplines, to share insights across this field of study and address pressing questions amidst a rapidly changing digital media environment.

This report summarizes two days of research presentations and workshops addressing four key areas that participants identified as being of the highest priority to the field of research on digital media and democracy in an unprecedented year for elections globally.