Live Monitoring Election 2020
By Maeve Sneddon and Andrea Lampros
UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center Investigations Lab and Investigative Reporting Program are engaged in social media live monitoring of the 2020 elections: More than 60 UC Berkeley undergraduate and Journalism School students, Investigations Lab alumni, and staff are working together in a virtual newsroom, from when the polls open in the East until they close in the West on Election Day. We continued the day after and the day after that and will continue through the week. We’re monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, and more for information about violence, voter suppression or intimidation, and dis/misinformation and feeding posts for use by our partners at Amnesty International and in the news media.
“Capturing what’s happening on this critical day in US history is a huge challenge,” said Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center and co-founder of the center’s Investigations Lab. “Our Berkeley students have been trained to mine the internet for information in real-time, to identify misinformation and verify facts, and to collaborate with leading newsrooms and human rights organizations to ensure accurate information reaches the public.”
Take a look at our intermittent real-time updates.
November 5: monitoring day 3
2:25pm
Look who stopped by the Zoom! HRC Investigations Lab alum and all-time favorite human Haley Willis (lower right), of the NY Times Visual Investigations team, brightens our afternoon monitoring.
November 4: monitoring day 2
7:54 pm
It’s nearing the end of day 2 of monitoring and the team has collected more than 550 pieces of content. We may even have to make a new spreadsheet — our current one is moving a little slowly.
When making plans for tomorrow, resiliency is on everyone’s mind. It has been two long days of monitoring, so the editorial team decides to make working tomorrow more informal, allowing students to decide when they want to hop on to help.
As Stephanie puts it, “I think informal is in-keeping with the vibe of the democratic process at this stage. Keeping the Zoom room open is a lovely way for people to continue to connect.”
6:12 pm
Protests begin to pop up around the country. Our partners at Amnesty direct us towards NYC, Portland, and Minneapolis. Brain quickly shifts two people to Minneapolis, one to Portland, and one to NYC to cover the breaking events.
2:32 pm
An afternoon update from Gisela indicates things are heating up: “Armored vehicles in both Philadelphia and Boston. Tensions escalating quickly. Detroit- super hot. We’re keeping a close eye and prioritizing archiving. In Michigan, disinfo tweets in Spanish are off the charts.”
10:30 am
The morning is quiet. Team members update our master spreadsheet from the night before and prepare for protests to come.
Rallies and protests in Philadelphia and Detroit hit in the late morning. Students refresh our oft-used Tweetdeck columns multiple times, with very little content coming in.
8:30 am
Day 2 of election monitoring begins. Gisela, Danielle, Avani, Alexa, Andrea, Maeve, Brian, Devon, and Stephanie hop on zoom to discuss plans for the day.
The focus for today, both across the country and for our team, is on states where votes have yet to be counted: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, and North Carolina. The team also prepares for protests planned for today. Danielle brings up arrests late last night by LAPD, and Brian mentions Philadelphia, Portland, and Seattle as potential hotspots.
Talk the turns to the resiliency of our teammates. Yesterday was a long and hard day, especially for those who are new to monitoring. Projects like these are complex, as Andrea explains: “You’re wanting to see bad things, because that’s your task, and it’s this weird psychological thing. We want people to feel successful and feel like they’re doing something even if they don’t find anything.”
Stephanie urges the team coordinators to take an active role in reassuring students that they’re on the right track. “We need to still keep a fully open mind to stories that we’re not seeing, things that no one is reporting on.”
“We’re all expecting horrible things and we might be missing the good things,” echoes Gisela.
Election Day
9:00 pm
The team is 10 strong, but exhausted. It’s been 14 hours since the launch of live monitoring. Protests are ongoing in LA, Seattle, Portland, but the team calls it a night. It may be a long week.
8:00 pm
From Gisela on Signal: “Night Update: 268 incidents. Protests and police getting tense in Washington DC, LA, Portland. Things are getting heated pretty much everywhere, but nothing in Florida, St.Louis, Louisville, and New York. We’re broadening our scope. If there’s anything you’d like us to focus on, let us know.”
7:15 pm
Evening update from Meher: “We’re now closing in on protests and violence in cities: Philadelphia and Minneapolis are big ones. Just trying to see if any clashes are occurring since there are multiple protests and counter-protests going on. And DC of course — close eyes on BLM Plaza.”
Monitoring efforts have now been ongoing for over 12 hours. The team has recorded over 250 pieces of content and tracked breaking incidents in Houston, TX, Washington, DC, Henderson, NV, and Westminster, CA. As results continue to be released, attention shifts from suppression at the polls to post-voting protests.
Although our Election Day monitoring efforts officially ends at 9:00 pm tonight, shifts have been set up for tomorrow, with 20+ volunteers already signed up.
4:00 pm
A check in with Amnesty lets us know that we’re on the right track: “Tomorrow will bring some more specific incidents that we would like you all to support us in researching, but until then, carry on as you are! This monitoring effort is so cool to see in action.”
Things are beginning to heat up as polls start to close on the East Coast. Several members are tracking protests in DC, where police are present and arrests are taking place. Other members are collecting search terms for areas where protests are planned later in the evening. A new lab member notices an incident in Alamance County, NC, and brings it to the attention of the zoom. Our spreadsheet grows to over 200 pieces of content, with much more to come as everyone prepares for results.
1:15 pm
After several hours of monitoring, our team is getting into the swing of things. Team leaders are learning how to handoff between shifts, while making sure all hot spots and platforms are covered. So far, everything seems relatively quiet—in the 100+ pieces of content collected, very few show violence.
Noon
Avani issues the midday report: “75 pieces of content, mostly voter interference…”
9:57 am
Our media partner sends a Signal message to the team: a tip line message says people in a polling place near Houston have bull horns and are yelling things like, “Whose side are you on? Trump 2020.”
Who can pivot to Harris County? Brian, CJ, Vyoma, and Katya start tracking on Tweetdeck.
9:00 am
The 9 am shift starts at Berkeley time, 9:10. “Welcome to the first official shift of election live monitoring!” says Avani, a Berkeley junior. The Zoom room swells to 12 and people fan out to hot spots and Battleground states.
6:30 am
We already have tech trouble with the Zoom room. Nothing a Signal message to Stephanie can’t fix. Maeve, Avani, Gisela, Brian, Andrea, and Stephanie jump in, cups of coffee and tea in hand, to set up Tweetdecks for monitoring.
Should we dive into Michigan? There’s activity in Texas: intimidation at the polls. Philadelphia is an early hotspot, with calls to watch the suppression of poll watchers. The first shift team focuses on the East Coast and quickly gathers over 20 pieces of content.
One Day Until Election Day
It’s a flurry of planning: finalizing the spreadsheet — actually multiple interconnected spreadsheets — assignments/roles, and onboarding instructions. Brian makes a video about our live monitoring plans. We send all of our spreadsheets, search terms, and workflows out to over 60 people, all of whom are anxious to help us start monitoring.
We’ve set up Signal groups with the leadership team and with our partners for Election Day coordination.
Cybersecurity expert Steve Trush leads a training on monitoring and security.
Nobody can wait. “Let people know that if they feel up to it, they can start doing some monitoring to get their hands dirty (once they read the materials and onboard themselves),” says Brian in Slack at around 8 pm.
Gisela: “Agree, let’s get started.”
Four Days Until Election Day
A leadership team emerges: Gisela, a Berkeley J-School alum and leader in our Investigations Lab, is our captain, bringing everyone together and masterminding the big picture. Brian, a journalist and first-year J-Schooler and our Investigations Lab student instructor, carves out our roles in the zoom room: coordinator, archivists, monitors, and more. He creates guides for beginner live monitors and advanced, whips out a cybersecurity cheat sheet. Wow.
Our Digital Verification Corps student leaders Avani, Maeve, Meher, and Danielle, work their magic with spreadsheets, search terms, and more. Our lab coordinator Devon designs a sign-up sheet to pull in more than 60 students and plug them into roles and shifts throughout Election Day. Our Americas team and disinformation team leads to jump in. Students, alumni, and staff meet on zoom in various configurations to brainstorm search terms, groups to watch, spreadsheet machinations, and doomsday scenarios.
We meet with our partners at Amnesty International and in the news media to finalize plans.
“What do you think we should do to have a Plan B?” asks Gisela to the team. “Also, nothing may happen. I’m actually expecting shit to go down on Wednesday and Thursday.”
One Week Until Election Day
The planning for monitoring on a large scale begins in earnest a week before November 3. As the leadership team meets for the first time, they are faced with the immense scale of the project. How can we organize a large-scale monitoring effort on perhaps the most important election in our lifetimes with only a week to go?
An important first step in any monitoring project is to narrow down the research question: what we will be looking for on election day? We look to our professional partners at Amnesty International and in the news media. They are asking for our help in discovering content related to voter intimidation, police presence, and dis/misinformation.
With those themes as a guide, the team can turn to planning our monitoring. Two questions arise: how will we refine the content we are taking in, and how do we organize content once we find it?
To tackle the first question, search terms and keywords must be developed beforehand. As anyone who has ever been on social media knows, the sheer amount of content is overwhelming, and on Election Day it will likely only be worse. To limit the deluge of information on November 3, we create search terms and keywords ahead of time to anchor our monitoring efforts.
To tackle the second question, we need a spreadsheet. A good one. Once content is found, we record it in a safe and organized way. The Lab has a lot of experience with this (we do it for nearly every project).
Having answered our first two questions, the team splits up to create search terms and a spreadsheet, hoping to meet up again shortly.
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This work is made possible by UC Berkeley’s Student Technology Fund, Open Society Foundations, Sigrid Rausing Trust, Oak Foundation, Full Circle Fund, and generous individual donors.
