Digital Threats to Democracy

Since its inception in 2018 as part of the Democracy Program’s technical leadership on democracy and elections, the Digital Threats to Democracy initiative has developed tools and methodologies to assess a range of issues in the online/digital information ecosystem related to democracy, elections, and broader political processes. Beginning in 2020, the Digital Threats team has piloted various tools and approaches to establish a foundation for continued Carter Center thought leadership in this area. It has worked to identify and mitigate online threats to democracy, including mis/disinformation, hate speech, online harassment, information operations, and dark political advertising.

Core Competencies

• Supporting independent and nonpartisan efforts to mitigate mis/disinformation through professional and sustainable fact-checking initiatives.
• Advocating for social media content moderation policy reforms in accordance with international human rights principles.
• Developing social media monitoring approaches for international election observation missions to identify activity that could undermine electoral integrity.
• Establishing strategic partnerships with credible organizations in the democracy, civil society, and conflict resolution arenas to address new, complex threats.
• Identifying and mitigating activity that could unduly undermine public confidence in elections, suppress political participation, or trigger hostility or violence.
• Equipping civil society organizations with knowledge and customized open-source tools to monitor threats and promote sustainability.
• Grounding this work in international human rights principles and democratic election standards.
• Addressing harms within local contexts using evidence-based analysis and decision-making.

Election Technology

Digital Threats has updated the Democracy Program’s 2012 Handbook on Safeguarding Electoral Technology. The new edition is designed to address changes over the last decade, such as mis/ disinformation, accessibility for people with disabilities, data privacy, and more. While the primary focus is on approaches for independent verification and scrutiny of election technologies throughout the electoral process, the handbook also examines how technologies can expand access to voting, including for persons with disabilities and minority communities.

Online Digital Safety Curriculum

Digital Threats leads the development of digital safety curriculum, which provides women in politics and civil society leaders with digital tools to respond appropriately to rapidly evolving forms of online violence and abuse. Digital Threats will explore additional avenues to make the program more valuable to aspiring political leaders as well as translate the materials into additional languages.

DIGIT (Digital Information Training)

Digital Threats developed educational materials for a media literacy curriculum — known as DIGIT — in partnership with Emory University. The DIGIT curriculum educates adults about how to consume and share online information responsibly. The team has collaborated with various universities (Syracuse University, Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Emory University, the United States Air Force Academy, and community colleges) and aligned institutions and organizations, such as the National Association of Media Literacy Education, to test the curriculum and has plans to translate it into additional languages..