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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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.

Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) has released two important papers, one that analyzes online hate and harassment networks targeting election officials and one that recommends how online platforms can ensure they are not contributing to potential political violence, including against election workers.

New Lab Notebook from Laura Edelson: Instagram and TikTok both say they have different feed experiences for users based on whether they are adults or minors. To find out, I tested these platforms as a 23 year old and 13 year old user, and found that the TikTok experiences was very different between my adult and teen 'personas', but the Instagram Reels experiences were not.