Publications

This paper serves as a summary report for the first phase of the Democracy and Internet Governance Initiative, a two-year joint initiative between Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy. It delves into the rationale and components of a new risk-centered approach to analyze and address the negative impacts of digital platforms. It also explores the key dimensions that should be considered when assessing platform risk, including mental and physical health, financial security, privacy, social and reputational wellbeing, professional security, sovereignty, and strength of public goods.

The Digital Platform Governance: Proposals Index (DPGP Index) is a database of primarily U.S.-centric proposals aimed at mitigating the harms and risks created by social media platforms. The goal of the DPGP Index is to provide a tool for researchers across the public, academic, and private sectors to query and search a variety of proposed solutions from experts all over the world, all in one location.

Note: this publication opens in the Belfer Center’s website.

In September 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower, revealed “The Facebook Papers” to Congress and global news outlets. These disclosures, accompanied by eight whistleblower reports to the SEC and related studies, emphasized concerns about teenagers’ mental and physical health. This case study provides key insights from those studies into the product development process and internal decision making for “Project Daisy,” an internal initiative at Facebook and Instagram designed to reduce the public visibility of like counts on user posts. We explore the harms to youth detailed in internal reports and studies, and the known flexibility tech companies have in designing interventions to mitigate potential harms without removing existing benefits.

Note: this publication opens in the Shorenstein Center’s website.

Using documents and evidence from Frances Haugen’s whistleblower documents, made available through FBarchive.org, this case study examines Facebook’s failure to consistently enforce its community guidelines on hate speech and ‘violence and incitement’ in India due to internal trade-offs between integrity and political objectives. It highlights the role that media outlets supported by internal stakeholders at the company played in increasing transparency around governance processes, leading to internal change.

Note: this publication opens in the Shorenstein Center’s website.