Data Portal Right-Wing Extremism - Further Development of the Community Data Trust Agency Model

For the “Data Portal for Research on Racism and Right-Wing Extremism”, the HBI is developing a research data infrastructure for the secure exchange of social media account lists in compliance with data protection regulations.

The “Data Portal for Research on Racism and Right-Wing Extremism” provides researchers with a research data infrastructure for collaboration in the creation of social media actor directories via a “data trust”. The data trust acts as an intermediary between the participating researchers in their roles as data collectors and data users by enabling the secure exchange of sensitive data on the one hand and ensuring compliance with ethical and data protection standards on the other. To this end, the researchers set rules for the joint management and access control of the data as part of a community model.

Following the development of the data portal, the organizational and operational model of the “community data trust” is now being further developed in the project launched in November 2023, which aims to improve the collaborative creation, use and maintenance of the data pool.

In this follow-up project, funded by the BMBF and the European Union – NextGenerationEU, the focus is on the further development of the participation model for the systematic and continuous involvement of the research community in the design of the incentive and regulatory structures of the data trustee. The project will address questions such as:

• What is the most effective way to collect data collaboratively?
• Which researchers should be given access to which sensitive data?
• And how can the reproducibility of research results be improved via the data trust?

In addition, various approaches to increasing data quality, for example by automatically checking that the data is up to date, are being researched. Our project partner is GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

Overall Project

The aim of the overall project with the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences GESIS was to set up and operate a data portal to support research into racism and right-wing extremism. The portal facilitates the search for and access to existing data sets and helps researchers to share their own research data.

As part of this overall project, the sub-project “Trust Agency Directory of Right-Wing Extremist Actors and Networks VrAN” was implemented at the HBI. It created a research data infrastructure for the secure exchange of social media actor directories in accordance with data protection regulations. With the help of external consultants, the project clarified the legal framework and requirements for a data exchange process via a trust office, which was set up at the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences GESIS. This data exchange process was implemented technically. In addition, templates were created for the legal documents for participation in the data exchange.

Workshops were held to ensure that the requirements of the scientific community were incorporated into the development of the data exchange process and that the work with the research infrastructure created for participation in data exchange could be practiced.

The equal political and social participation of religious and ethnic minorities has once again become increasingly visible as a political fault line since the wave of immigration in 2015/2016. This line of conflict is relevant because the rule of law is required to prevent discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities.

Social science research is called upon to intensify its research into the causes and effects of racism and extremism to provide an empirical basis for the development of effective intervention programs.

Research data infrastructures can increase the efficiency of the research process by sharing data and instruments within the research community. This avoids redundant surveys and enables access to particularly important data sources.

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