Organized by the Communication and Politics Group…

ABSTRACT: The National Internet Observatory (NIO) is an NSF-funded project aimed to help researchers study online behavior. Participants install a browser extension and/or mobile apps to donate their online activity data along with comprehensive survey responses. The infrastructure, housed at Northeastern University, starting in 2025, will offer approved researchers access to a suite of structured, parsed content data for selected domains to enable analyses and understanding of Internet use in the US. This is all conducted within a robust research ethics framework, emphasizing ongoing informed consent, and multiple layers, technical and legal, of interventions to protect the values at stake in data collection, data access, and research. This talk will provide a brief overview of the NIO infrastructure, the data collected, the participants, and the researcher intake process.