Ethics and release
Release 0.4.0 · 2026-08-15
Harm minimisation
This index is designed for democratic-integrity and agency research. It does not reproduce deceptive media, voter lists, targeting data, operational playbooks, evasion guidance, or instructions that would make interference easier. Source URLs support inspection, but the release does not archive or redistribute copyrighted or harmful media.
Naming actors
Public officials, candidates, organisations, and adjudicated or officially named actors may be identified when necessary for the research record. Private individuals are named only when already central to authoritative public proceedings. Attribution labels preserve the difference between admission, allegation, official assessment, and final adjudication.
Ongoing elections
Publishing monitoring indicators during an election can itself create risk. Indicators are therefore defensive and aggregate: disclosure compliance, official complaints, verified synthetic-media incidents, coordinated-network takedowns, election-authority notices, and changes in platform response. The dataset excludes evasion tactics and targeting vulnerabilities.
Preparedness files are explicitly excluded from incident counts. Model-capability tests and randomized experiments remain in a separate empirical-study layer so that laboratory evidence cannot be misrepresented as deployed manipulation.
Research claims
The release is a purposive, exploratory evidence index. It does not empirically prove agency transfer, estimate global or regional prevalence, identify votes changed, or attribute an election winner to AI. Platform metrics are not unique people; official results are not causal designs; institutional alarm is not behavioural evidence. Pathway assessments are transparent researcher syntheses, not measured outcomes.
The automated audit performs internal structural and semantic QA. It cannot verify source truth, adjudicate an allegation, establish that a source supports every word of a claim, make purposive sampling representative, or validate causality. Those limits must remain visible even when the audit reports zero blocking errors.
Provenance limits
Public links are retained, but source objects are not frozen in this repository. Among 124 claim relations, 57 pinpoints cover the full claim, 47 cover only a factual premise or part and 20 are not verified because the cited object was inaccessible; locator_coverage makes that limit machine-readable. Blank archive URLs and hashes remain explicit gaps. A user must inspect and cite the underlying source before relying on a substantive claim. The project should add lawful snapshots and hashes where possible without redistributing harmful or copyrighted material.
Corrections
Corrections should identify the affected record, provide supporting evidence, retain counterevidence and preserve a changelog. main is mutable; numbered tags are the citable research revisions and should never be moved after publication. Each release must reconcile tables, documentation, citation metadata, manifest and packaged artifacts.
No DOI is assigned to v0.4.0. A future DOI should identify a frozen deposit and be added only after its tag, commit, hashes and citation record agree.