In July 2022, the Influence Industry Project hosted their second online Summer School. Partnering with the Exposing the Invisible team, we ran a two-week program designed to equip participants with investigation strategies, tools and techniques specifically geared toward the political influence industry. The Summer School sessions explored the intersection between investigative journalism and the political influence industry. Below are some of the takeaways and highlights.
The Summer School included 40 participants representing over 30 countries. The participants brought a breadth of experience from the worlds of journalism, election monitoring, and fact-checking organisations. This diversity of professional experience contributed to the high-level conversations and presentations.
The courses were divided across three main categories: the intricacies of political influence industry, investigation techniques, and real-world experiences. The entire program reinforced several key messages about formulating flexible, cohesive research questions, practical investigation techniques, best practices while working with a variety of data sets and what conclusions or outputs can be drawn from the research.
Some of the highlights from presentations included:
- A presentation from project lead, Amber Macintyre, on the comprehensive research that our project has completed in the past half decade, including the evolution of the original research question for our project. The presentation demonstrated how digital research projects can evolve.
- Guest speaker Sam Jeffers, from Who Targets Me, gave a presentation that detailed his own past experience working in the influence industry and now as co-founder of an organisation monitoring the industry’s activities, which brought a personal touch to the industry.
- Tetyana Bohdanova walked participants through her own experience researching the 2019 Ukrainian elections. Tetyana paid particular attention to defining the scope and subjects of research, explaining the theory as well as her own research as a case study.
- For participants new to investigation techniques in general, Exposing the Invisible project expert Laura Ranca delivered a masterclass in investigation, sprinkled with engaging – and surprising – personal anecdotes.
- Rowan Philp, from the Global Investigative Journalism Network, also delivered a presentation for high-level professionals and beginning journalists alike detailing a wide variety of useful online tools for journalists. With an intimidating topic like the purposefully confusing and shadowy influence industry, his carefully detailing of existing tools and resources was incredibly practical.
- After research questions are formulated and data is collected, the task of going through and making sense of the data remains. Kate Dommett, of the University of Sheffield, walked participants through her own research from the paper Regulating the Business of Election Campaigns (co-authored with Amber Macintyre). Kate explained how she and her team went through thousands of invoices, the best practices for developing coded categories, helpful tips for researchers and the conclusions their research drew. One tip in particular came while Kate was explaining how to create comprehensive codes for data: she emphasized the importance of taking the time to develop a sample before beginning the research even though it’s time intensive.
- The theory, research and tools were brought to life in the presentation by Austin Aigbe from Centre for Democracy and Development in Nigeria, detailing their research into the influence industry. Austin’s explanation of the Nigerian voting context and their findings illustrated the scope of the influence industry and the determination needed by researchers.
- Finally, Victor Durigan from Instituto Vero in Brazil highlighted their organisation’s research and outreach. Victor’s presentation focused not only on the Brazilian context but also emphasised what civil society organisations can do to engage voters and spark a conversation within a community. Victor’s presentation was particularly valuable for its focus on communicating the findings to voters.
Even in a time of online meeting or webinar fatigue, the Summer School offered participants a chance to gain a broader understanding of the group. One participant shared that they appreciated, “the diversity of the group, the shared experiences and finding here a community that I have been looking for a long time, personally, to continue learning about these topics.” The Influence Industry Summer School will be back in 2023: subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed.
This blog was written by Cassiane Cladis.
