The online information environment is pervasive in human life, shaping outcomes across fields ranging from mental health, to disaster response, to political violence.

Unfortunately, research is not keeping pace with the scale of challenges or speed of changes.

Researchers are spending vast amounts of time duplicating engineering efforts instead of focusing on social science because we have not yet built the shared infrastructure needed to study the information environment efficiently. 

Together we can overcome the legal, organizational, and technical challenges that have so far impeded research and evidence-based policymaking on the information environment. The field would produce broader and deeper research if understanding the information environment wasn’t so expensive and difficult. Then, decision-makers would be more likely to implement policies based on sound scientific evidence, as we expect them to do in other policy areas, ranging from education to commerce.

The Accelerator will speed scientific progress by providing shared engineering infrastructure, maintaining data resources, supporting access for a broad group of researchers, and ultimately enabling policy analysis for a wide range of the world’s liberal democracies. To achieve this, we have started building tools with a global consortium of partners.