Tech Accountability and Safety
Tech accountability is the responsibility of social media platforms to ensure their products are safe, transparent, and adhere to ethical design principles. It involves answering for their actions—or inactions—that contribute to or exacerbate online harms, as well as committing to regulatory oversight and transparency to create a safer, more responsible digital ecosystem.
We believe tech companies have a responsibility to ensure their products are safe and designed in a way that protects and fosters both democracy and human rights. However, as research from ISD and many others has consistently shown, social media platforms and associated technologies often facilitate the spread of extremism, terrorism, hate and information manipulation online. This has been linked to a range of on-and-offline harms, including inciting violence, amplifying disinformation and conspiracy theories, enabling hate speech and harassment, increasing political polarisation, and facilitating radicalisation. The absence of regulatory oversight has meant that tech companies have too often not been held accountable for these harms while public-interest researchers continue to face barriers to studying the inner workings and impacts of their platforms.
Accountability and Speech Protection
Technology companies hold immense power in the modern information environment, and ISD works to hold these influential actors accountable. ISD advances tech accountability primarily by advocating for greater transparency, which is essential to building trust among the public, governments, regulators, the private sector, and social media platform—and to strengthening accountability across these stakeholders.
Content Moderation
Term with the slug "content-moderation" not found in the "our-expertise" taxonomy.
Data access and transparency
Greater transparency from technology companies allows citizens and researchers to better understand the nature and extent of online harms including terrorist propaganda, extremist indoctrination, weaponised hate and influence operations on their platforms. Our work on transparency includes policy advice to governments, regulators and key multistakeholder initiatives.
Digital rights and Protections
Digital rights are the internationally recognised human rights—such as freedom of expression, privacy, access to information, and protection from discrimination—that apply in digital and online environments. Ensuring digital rights is central to safeguarding democratic values.
Emerging Technologies
Terrorist and extremist groups routinely adopt new technologies to evade law enforcement, ranging from decentralised platforms to generative AI. Our research and advisory work are ahead of the curve in predicting, identifying and responding to these new trends. The research and policy guidance we provide helps frontline practitioners, law enforcement agencies and democratic governments worldwide.
Freedom of expression
Freedom of expression is a UN-recognized fundamental right to hold or share an opinion or idea without fear of reprisal, censorship or legal action.
Gaming and Alternative Platforms
ISD’s sector-leading research has identified a growing number of alternative and smaller platforms used by hateful, extremist and terrorist actors to spread illegal content and evade scrutiny. Our insights have deepened understandings of how online harms manifest on novel platforms, provided valuable intelligence on threats, and informed policymakers, regulators, technology companies and the wider research community on how to improve online safety across the evolving online ecosystem.
Kids Online Safety
Kids online safety refers to practices and policies that protect children and teenagers from harm while in digital spaces, such as social media, while also allowing them to engage and participate online safely.
Recommender Systems and Algorithms
ISD’s research explores how algorithms and generative AI can amplify terrorist content as well as weaponised hate and influence operations across online platforms. This offers valuable insights into potential risks to democratic processes and extremist indoctrination. Our advisory work on social media algorithms explores solutions to these challenges including changes to policies and platform designs, as well as greater transparency through mechanisms including algorithmic audits.
Tech Legislation and regulation
Effective legislation and regulation are key to improving the experiences of people online and protecting individual rights and freedom of expression, while mitigating crime, threats to national security and other online harms. Thoughtful, well-crafted regulation can play a key role in changing the incentives and culture of tech companies, improving their transparency and accountability for online safety. ISD’s research and advisory work has fed into the successful development of key pieces of legislation globally.
