CivicLens

Most of what shapes public opinion online is invisible to the people whose job it is to understand it. Researchers can’t see inside closed messaging apps. Journalists can’t watch a rumor move from a fringe video host into a mainstream feed. Platforms have spent the last several years closing the few windows that existed — most visibly when Facebook wound down CrowdTangle, the main tool anyone had for studying the platform.

CivicLens is the instrument built to look anyway.

It’s a social listening platform for understanding digital civic discourse, collecting data — manually and automatically — across 15+ platforms: open social media, fringe and alternative networks, and closed messaging apps that mainstream tools don’t cover. Bitchute, Facebook, Gab, GETTR, Instagram, OK.ru, Parler, Rumble, Telegram, TikTok, Truth Social, X, VK, YouTube, plus podcasts and Substack. One place, because a narrative that looks small on any single platform is often not small at all.

It launched as Junkipedia and was built under the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, founded at NCoC in 2019 to give researchers, journalists, and civil society the leverage they don’t otherwise have against platforms that grade their own homework.

What it has actually produced

The strongest case for a monitoring platform isn’t its architecture. It’s what got found with it.

Amnesty International — a regulatory complaint against TikTok. ATI was the named technical partner on Amnesty’s investigations into TikTok’s recommender system. In Driven into the Darkness (2023), 30+ automated accounts representing 13-year-olds in Kenya and the USA documented how the algorithm pulled children toward self-harm and suicidal content. The France study (2025) found the recommender more than doubled the share of sad or depressive content served to simulated 13-year-olds. Amnesty filed a formal complaint with the French regulator Arcom under the Digital Services Act on the strength of that research, and it supports an eleven-family class action against TikTok.

Mozilla Foundation — the first audit of platform data access. Public Data Access Programs: A First Look (2024) was joint research by Mozilla and NCoC: a systematic evaluation of 19 major platforms’ data access programs, scored against 47 criteria across five categories. Nobody had measured it before.

Greenpeace Netherlands and Dr. Geoffrey Supran — Three Shades of Greenwashing (2022), on how European fossil fuel, car, and airline companies market themselves as environmentally friendly.

Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project — narrative dynamics around COVID-19 vaccines (2022).

Newsrooms. NBC News, ProPublica’s Electionland, and The Markup used the platform as the basis for reporting, not merely as a citation.

Who uses it

Newsrooms	The Washington Post, Reuters, Financial Times, The New York Times
Universities	Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Michigan, Kentucky, Georgetown
Civil society	The Carter Center, Amnesty International, Global Strategic Communications Council

Where it came from

It started in a newsroom. A 2017 Knight Foundation Prototype Fund grant paid for NewsTracker, built at PBS NewsHour to find and track misinformation sources at scale. The reporting it enabled became a four-part investigation into junk news, and the software outlived the story.

That’s the pattern: the reporting exposed a measurement problem, and the measurement problem needed an instrument.

The Civic Listening Corps

Software alone doesn’t understand context. The Civic Listening Corps pairs the platform with trained volunteers monitoring what they encounter in their own communities and information environments — people-powered monitoring feeding a machine-powered collection system.