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Project Description

Beginning in late 2022 and throughout 2023 and 2024, the tech industry imposed significant budget cuts and workforce reductions, in some cases in response to economic uncertainty, and in others as a result of fundamental mission and value shifts by executive leadership. Teams working on trust and safety, policy, content moderation, and ethics were particularly hard hit: X disbanded its ethical artificial intelligence and election integrity teams, Google cut approximately one third of its team dedicated to addressing information manipulation and censorship, and Meta eliminated thousands of positions with an outsized impact on its trust and safety teams. Simultaneously, social media companies began restricting access to data used by researchers to assess threats to information space. X, for example, imposed exorbitant fees to access its API and Meta announced plans to shut down its widely used social monitoring platform, CrowdTangle. These developments have raised concerns around social media companies’ ability to anticipate and respond to online harms during a year in which elections are being held in more than fifty countries, including some of the world’s largest democracies.

NDI seeks a short-term consultant to support an initiative to measure the impact of these developments on organizations and individuals operating in the democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) space. These impacts will be measured through surveys and semi-structured interviews and will inform the development of a report to supplement the advocacy of NDI and other organizations in the DRG community around the accountability and transparency of social media companies.

Deliverables

• A synthesis of changes social media companies have made to their policies and enforcement practices since 2022 that represent a potential retrenchment on trust and safety and civic integrity, to be produced primarily through desk research
• In consultation with NDI, develop and implement a survey or questionnaire to measure how DRG actors perceive the impact of these changes on democracy and information integrity. Illustratively, the survey could measure observed changes in resolutions to reporting of harmful behavior and accounts, the ability to conduct research on social media platforms, and access to channels for direct communication with social media companies
• Semi-structured interviews with at least ten stakeholders, identified in coordination with NDI, to supplement the survey responses with more robust, detailed examples
• An assessment of relevant evidence gathered by other organizations (as needed)
• A narrative summary of the findings from the survey and interviews

Expected Period of Work

July 2024 - October 2024

Desired Qualifications

• Familiarity with social media companies’ structures and policies
• Demonstrated involvement in dialogue around tech sector trust and safety, accountability, transparency, etc.
• Knowledge of developments in tech regulation (ex: the Digital Services Act, General Data Protection Regulation, other international laws)
• Experience working internationally and/or with DRG actors
• Proficiency in an additional language would be a plus

Interested applicants should send a resume, cover letter and proposal submission to include a portfolio of past work and a detailed budget with fee requirements to Rachelle Faust at rfaust@ndi.org.