Cybersecurity for Democracy

Cybersecurity for Democracy is a multi-university center for problem-driven research and research-driven policy. We conduct cutting-edge cybersecurity research to better understand the distorting effects of algorithms and AI tools on large online networks and work with platforms and regulators to help all parties understand the implications of our findings and develop solutions.

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A swath of potentially consequential cases for kids’ online safety are making their way through U.S. courts that focus on how Meta’s design features and choices allegedly harm young users. We partnered with legal and social media experts on an amicus brief in the multi district litigation (MDL) case against Meta, explaining why Section 230 should not apply in this case.

Big tech companies are collecting increasingly detailed information about us across all websites, including those that handle especially sensitive and legally protected data, like financial aid applications, doctor appointments, and tax filings. Our research shows how Google and Meta encourage website administrators to not only install tracking scripts on their websites but configure them to automatically collect users’ Personally Identifying Information (PII).

Our research defining transparency mechanisms and experience building transparency tools have informed legislation such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) in Europe. In October, the European Commission launched a public consultation on the rules for researchers to access online platform data under the DSA, the goal of which was to solicit input ahead of adopting the rules in the first quarter of 2025.

For the past year and a half, we at Cybersecurity for Democracy have been working extensively with the TikTok Research API. We’ve discussed our first impressions of it and our open-source library to help researchers interface with the API.

At Cybersecurity for Democracy, one of our goals is to increase transparency in the tech industry and build tools to increase researchers ability to study online platforms. Recently we’ve been diving into TikTok’s ecosystem to better understand the platform's influence on polarizing topics and how people communicate on social media.

Meta platform ads linking to Telegram groups

Finding illegal content in ads on Meta is as simple as searching for Telegram links in the Meta ad library. We did so on August 28th, and we manually reviewed the most recently posted ads in the United States from that day with links to Telegram. We found that 64% of those Telegram-linked ads appear to have violated Meta’s policies, including some promoting illegal activity. One design change to Meta’s ad systems that could mitigate this issue would be to simply flag Telegram-linked ads for human review, or higher scrutiny before they can be approved to run on Meta’s ad network.