Social Media Monitoring Pilot Project

This project aims to contribute to tackling issues of insufficiency of methodological and legal framework concerning abusive behaviors on social media, particularly focusing on monitoring of online activities for signals of campaign violations and violations of the Facebook Community Standards in the light of the Montenegro 2020 Parliamentary elections.

The overall goal of the project is to contribute to the overall integrity of election processes in Montenegro, to enable voters to make an informed choice. The attainments of the project goal will be ensured through achievement of the specific objective which puts emphasis on increasing transparency and accountability for activities and behaviors on social media during electoral period, throughout the monitoring of coordinated inauthentic behavior during electoral campaign.

With this project, Center for Monitoring and Research (CeMI) in collaboration with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) will build a monitoring approach utilizing CrowdTangle platform to investigate how political subjects and other entities use Facebook and identify signals of campaign violations and violations of the Facebook Community Standards, foreign influence, voter interference violations, and look if there are indications of coordinated inauthentic behavior in relation to how candidates and campaigns are using Facebook. Under this project, IFES and CeMI will build out a scalable continuum of programming that will push toward a broad objective of bringing added transparency to online information around elections, in partnership with Facebook.