Normative and Digital Solutions to Counter Threats during National Election Campaigns (RightNets)

Digital campaigning is bound to become more and more influential in political life, increasingly affecting the organisation of election campaigns, in Italy as well as in other Countries. In this context, the lack of a specific regulation of the phenomenon entails considerable risks for the very democratic resilience of the system. In particular, the purchase of political advertising on the internet can be used by foreign States to influence the outcome of elections and can also lend itself to the phenomena of covert or illicit financing of politics. Social networks represent one of the main channels of digital campaigning, also due to the fact that they enable targeted political propaganda (micro-targeting). The analysis of the data running on the main social media can be a very useful tool to analyse the actual contours of digital campaigning and the risks it entails. In addition to this, interactions on social networks increasingly describe the modern voter/elector relationship and today the accountability of elected representatives finds an important place in social network accounts. The concept at the heart of the project is to collect and process massive anonymized campaign data found on social networks (interactions, advertising expenditure, posts, etc.) through the work of data scientists and use them to set up possible regulatory solutions to the challenges posed by the political dimension of ‘digital constitutionalism’. This is achieved thanks to the participation of both data scientists and law scholars in the research team. Such interdisciplinary collaboration will lead to the creation of models for analysing social network data that can also be employed by public authorities that monitor compliance with the legal regulations concerning election campaigns and the financing of parties and candidates. Similar analysis models have so far been used to predict election results (and have proven to be quite reliable). Thanks to the data collected and processed, the research aims to investigate three aspects: 1) the size and constitutional relevance of the pollution of the public debate on social networks by various means such as bots, fake accounts, etc.; 2) the flow of money channelled into social networks for the purchase of political advertising; 3) the types of voter/elector interactions and the role of reactions on social networks in directing representatives towards certain behaviours. Starting from the results of this survey, the research will therefore focus on what legal instruments are suitable to ensure an online political competition that is fair and free of fraudulent means. It will build tools to monitor the origin of political ads on social networks and assess the extent of possible foreign interference in Italian election campaigns. Regulatory counter-measures meant to deal with this threat will also be assessed. Finally, the research will investigate the current meaning of the political representative mandate.