Pro-democracy platform advocacy: A dataset of project-related content

As part of an MSCA postdoctoral project entitled "Pro-Democracy Platform Advocacy: Fostering Social Media's Accountability to Dissident Voices under Authoritarianism", we share a dataset of (a) materials used in expert interviews conducted during December 2023 - March 2024, (b) metadata and coding on public Facebook content posted during March - April 2024, and (c) regression code and output of a model to assess the availability of pro-authoritarian accounts. First, we conducted semi-structured expert interviews with 38 respondents from Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. Second, based on insight from the interviews, we built a list of prominent political Facebook accounts and keywords to capture Myanmar, Cambodian, and Thai authoritarian content, including pro-regime propaganda, anti-dissident disinformation, promotion of anti-dissident violence, or anti-dissident doxing content. We used CrowdTangle – Meta's own social media monitoring tool – to capture content on a daily basis based on our list of authoritarian accounts and keywords. This dataset includes metadata on random samples of 2000 Myanmar posts, 2000 Thai posts, and 2000 Cambodian posts with qualitative coding. Third, to examine whether Myanmar accounts that have posted authoritarian content are more likely to be removed by Meta afterwards, compared to non-Myanmar accounts, we ran a mixed-effects logistic regression (with Stata version 14.2) on all authoritarian posts in our coded dataset (N=3112).

To ensure privacy and confidentiality of vulnerable participants, this dataset does not contain (a) interview transcripts or interviewees' identifying information or (b) original social media posts or their identifying information such as URLs, authors' names, or channels' names. We further redacted other personal data from the informed consent forms.