Research Projects

We study the socio-technical systems that shape political information environments in the United States and abroad, with a particular focus on how digital platforms, institutions, and communities can either amplify or reduce manipulation, polarization, misinformation, and civic distrust. Its central goal is to develop research, tools, policies, and partnerships that support higher-quality, more reliable, and more civil information spaces.

GEIS brings together researchers from information science, computer science, political science, public policy, communication, computational social science, and related fields. Members’ expertise spans social media and crisis informatics, platform governance, political communication, polarization, misinformation, social networks, information quality, privacy and security, intergroup relations, political institutions, and civic innovation. This interdisciplinary structure reflects GEIS’s view that threats to democratic information systems are not purely technical or purely political, but socio-technical problems requiring both empirical research and practical institutional engagement.

The group’s research agenda includes four broad areas: online manipulation, including covert or coordinated uses of technology to influence public decision-making; information quality, including the accuracy, reliability, and comprehensibility of online content; polarization, including ideological and affective divisions in political life; and content moderation, including how platforms govern user-generated content in ways that affect democratic discourse. GEIS members publish across leading academic venues and contribute to public understanding through media appearances, policy engagement, and data resources for the research community.

A major GEIS project is SLEM: Student-Led Election Monitoring, a Maryland-focused cooperative that trains students to monitor election-related information across their own social media environments. SLEM is designed to give election officials, researchers, and the public better visibility into what constituents are actually encountering online. Students flag relevant election content, GEIS analysts aggregate and verify trends, and the cooperative produces outputs such as weekly situation briefs, geographic and platform-level dashboards, real-time escalation alerts for high-risk misinformation, verified content repositories, and datasets for academic research. The project is explicitly nonpartisan and privacy-conscious, with GEIS and the Maryland Democracy Initiative serving as institutional anchors.

Another flagship project is VIOLETS: Voter Information from Official Local Election Trusted Sources, an AI-powered election information chatbot designed to help voters access accurate, trustworthy, and personalized election information. VIOLETS is grounded entirely in official Maryland and Montgomery County election sources and is being developed for a randomized controlled trial during the November 2026 U.S. midterm election in Montgomery County, Maryland. The project investigates whether AI-supported access to official information can increase trust in election officials, improve voter knowledge, reduce election-related misinformation beliefs, and encourage civic engagement.

GEIS members also conduct research on platform governance and political behavior. Recent work includes studies of post–January 6 deplatforming and its long-term effects on ideological polarization, WhatsApp deactivation and misinformation exposure during elections, social media bans and partisan attitudes, the gap between stated and revealed preferences in social media news feeds, and public behavioral responses to protest movements such as Black Lives Matter. These projects connect computational methods, experiments, surveys, and social media data to questions of democratic resilience and information integrity.

Through its research, public-facing projects, and partnerships with election officials, civic institutions, students, and scholars, GEIS aims to serve as both a research hub and a civic infrastructure builder. Its work advances the scientific understanding of online information environments while producing practical tools and evidence that can help communities, platforms, and public institutions respond to emerging threats in democratic information systems.