Accountable Tech: A Content-Agnostic Election Integrity Framework for Online Platforms. Published September 2023. “With over 50 countries set to hold elections amidst tectonic geopolitical and technological shifts, 2024 will present unprecedented challenges for democracy and the information gatekeepers who support it. Those challenges are compounded by increasing volatility of the content policy landscape, as partisan debates over where platforms should draw the lines grow more bitter, and repressive regimes engage in draconian censorship under the guise of countering disinformation. But there is a clear path forward to avoid these pitfalls, build consensus, and protect both freedom of expression and free and fair elections – a path to build Democracy By Design. Below, we outline a set of high-impact, content-agnostic election integrity recommendations for online platforms – readily actionable interventions rooted in their own product design and policy toolkits, and in many cases, empirically backed by their own research.
The Democracy By Design framework includes three major planks, under which there are specific recommendations and background to support them:

• Bolstering Resilience, which focuses on ‘soft interventions’ that introduce targeted friction and context to mitigate harm;
• Countering Election Manipulation, which outlines bulwarks against evolving threats posed by malign actors and automated systems; and
• Paper Trails, which highlights key transparency measures needed to assess systemic threats, evaluate the efficacy of interventions, and foster trust. The result is a framework meant to avoid political landmines and broadly resonate across nations with distinct laws and cultures, and platforms with incongruous architecture and resources – a consensus roadmap to enhance systemic resilience against election threats.”