The information environment has far-reaching impacts, shaping our mental health, our response to everyday events, and even political violence. 

Unfortunately, research is not keeping pace with the scale of challenges or speed of changes, leaving decision-makers without reliable evidence to guide critical decisions.

Because we have not built the necessary shared infrastructure to efficiently study the information environment – which encompasses the on- and offline worlds – researchers are duplicating engineering work and other efforts instead of focusing on research.

In addition to challenges with data access, many existing tools are too technically complex for most stakeholders to easily use, and no one is maintaining systems that could support the field as a whole, because it is too expensive and time consuming for any one research lab to handle on their own. 

The Accelerator was formed to not only speed scientific progress, but increase its quality by providing shared technical resources, while supporting access for a broad group of researchers that will enable evidence-based work around the world.