University of Massachusetts Amherst

The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure (IDPI), housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a research effort to study the civic and social role of internet platforms, and advocate for approaches to digital infrastructures that treat platforms and supporting technologies as public spaces and public goods. IDPI hosts a team of researchers, programmers, policy experts and advocates focused on a range of interrelated projects to imagine and design alternative structural and financial models for social media.  Having reached its capacity for developing and implementing its work within a university setting, the team at the University of Massachusetts has decided to sunset its work on IDPI. This grant enables IDPI to document the many successes and lessons learned from work already completed or nearing completion, as well as to transfer some projects to new homes and wrap up other parts of their work within the next two years.

The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure (iDPI), housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a new research center that brings together scholars and practitioners from across technical, policy, media, and legal fields to work on an approach for building online public spaces that actively work to strengthen society. This X-Grant supports iDPI’s Invisibility Project, an examination of how social media and other digital tools have been weaponized to make invisible vulnerable and persecuted populations in both authoritarian regimes and illiberal democracies. Project researchers are using ethnographic and quantitative methods to understand the experiences of Muslim minority populations in exile, specifically the Uighur, Rohingya, Kashmiri and Kurdish populations in exile. Anticipated outputs are a set of academic articles about silencing in Uighur, Rohingya, and Kashmiri communities, and public press articles on silencing as a strategy for illiberal democracies.

The Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure (iDPI), housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a new research center that brings together scholars and practitioners from across technical, policy, media and legal fields to work on an approach for building online public spaces that actively work to strengthen society. Much like the public broadcasting system that was built in the late 1960s in reaction to what the Federal Communications Commission viewed as the deleterious effects of commercial television, iDPI is calling for a similar shift around public spaces on the internet. It is using this flexible support grant to re-imagine and build a more open, inclusive and civically minded internet. This includes creating new tools to host and study civic-oriented online communities; integrating these online civic spaces with existing platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube; and building policy expertise to support the creation of a civic-minded internet over the longer term.