The International Politics and Responsible Tech (iPART) lab is directed by Dr. Swati Srivastava, Associate Professor of Political Science. 

Since 2019, this lab develops original research on the global politics of Big Tech as firms engage in unprecedented "algorithmic governance.”  

 

There are four current projects. One builds and analyzes an original dataset of over 4,000 incidents concerning Facebook's sociopolitical harms since the company's founding (2004) using news data. A second tracks and evaluates over 1,000 Big Tech-related regulatory activities worldwide in privacy and content governance. iPART has also assembled a Tech Transparency Database that collects existing public-interest reports and disclosures of the 18 largest online platforms. Finally, the lab also gathers essential data on how large tech companies interpret their obligations to meaningfully identify and mitigate sociopolitical harms when conducting human rights-centered impact assessments. 

 

The lab has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and several internal grants at Purdue.