We’ve met news organizations around the world who suffer crippling digital attacks when they publish something controversial or that questions powerful institutions. Project Shield uses Google’s infrastructure to protect independent news sites from distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), a type of digital attack that exploits thousands or even millions of computers to overwhelm a website’s servers and take it offline.

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Most of the world lives in countries that censor the internet. uProxy, seeded by Jigsaw and owned by the University of Washington, provides people access to the free and open internet by letting anyone who lives in a repressive society share the connection of someone who lives in a country with open internet access. uProxy works on an internet browser, with the option to set up a cloud server to provide constant access to the open internet.

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For the activists we’ve met, having their password stolen can be devastating. Password Alert is a Chrome extension that alerts you if a website is trying to steal your password. For most of us, stolen passwords can be a nuisance or result in the theft of sensitive information, but for journalists and activists who work in sensitive environments, the consequences can be far more severe.

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Few things poison conversations online more than abusive language, threats, and harassment. We’re studying how computers can learn to understand the nuances and context of abusive language at scale. If successful, machine learning could help publishers and moderators improve comments on their platforms and enhance the exchange of ideas on the internet.

One of the easiest ways to silence someone online is a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). But it’s difficult to solve a problem you can’t see. Digital Attack Map visualizes the most powerful DDoS attacks happening in the world right now, using data from our partner Arbor Networks. DDoS attacks sometimes relate directly to events in the real world such as conflicts or political disputes.

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One of the greatest threats to free expression is censorship you can’t see. Unfiltered.News maps what important news stories might not be covered in your country, using the Google News corpus to allow internet users to discover which stories are being covered in certain locations, how different countries cover stories differently, and how issue coverage changes over time.

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Violent extremist groups like ISIS use the Internet to spread propaganda and recruit new members. The Redirect Method is focused on reaching those who are actively looking for extremist content and connections. Rather than create new content and counter-narratives, our approach tries to divert young people off the path to extremism using pre-existing YouTube content and targeted advertising.

Graduated to Moonshot CVE

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We’ve worked with former extremists from around the world to find ways to break the cycle of radicalization. Abdullah-X is an animated YouTube series that explores themes of young Muslim identity in society and aims to steer young minds away from extremism. The cartoon was created by X-Kreative, an organization founded by a former extremist to counter the online propaganda of groups like ISIS.

Graduated to X-Kreative

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We’ve spoken to police officers who work in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world, from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the slums of Cape Town. Copcast is an open-source project that can turn any Android phone into a body-worn camera system for law enforcement, providing a more cost-effective and accessible solution for law enforcement officers around the world. Copcast improves police oversight, with the goal of making citizens safer.

Graduated to The Igarapé Institute

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For researchers who investigate war crimes, the ability to sort through hundreds of hours of video footage can be the difference between finding evidence of atrocities and missing the crucial detail. Montage gives researchers the tools to analyze vast amounts of YouTube footage and has been particularly effective in reviewing footage from conflict zones such as Syria.

Graduated to Storyful

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For investigative journalists, financial records are the clues that reveal government corruption or crimes. Investigative Dashboard makes public documents (such as financial or property records) searchable and more useful for journalists investigating money laundering or corruption. The tool also allows researchers and journalists to work collaboratively, creating a platform for data-driven investigations.

Graduated to OCCRP

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The challenge of amending or rewriting a country’s constitution is daunting—and it occurs more often than you might think. Constitute digitized the world’s constitutions to make them searchable and comparable by topic, allowing drafters and researchers to compare how the world’s constitutions treat certain issues, from free speech to women’s rights.

Graduated to The CCP

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At least two-thirds of the world’s internet is censored. And global democratic rights have experienced a decade of decline. We partnered with VICE News to create BLACKOUT, a documentary series about the global struggle for free expression and the role technology plays on both sides of the fight. Each episode focuses on a different country where people are demanding more rights.

Graduated to VICE News

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The flow of small arms and ammunition sales fuels the world’s conflicts, yet it’s hard to trace where these weapons come from. Working with the Igarapé Institute, we created a data visualization that maps the world’s legal arms trade, showing what governments are selling weapons and which ones are buying them. The tool allows journalists, diplomats and activists to see how the flow of weapons and ammunition affects geopolitics around the world

Graduated to The Igarapé Institute

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In the midst of the Syrian civil war, it was difficult to find reliable information about which side was winning and how the government of Bashar Al-Assad was disintegrating. We built a tool in partnership with Al Jazeera that uses social media to crowdsource information about which government officials were defecting from the Assad government and joining the opposition.

Graduated to Al Jazeera

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Every year, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children fall victim to human trafficking, a problem that affects every country. We worked with anti-human trafficking organization Polaris Project to develop an international strategy for improving data collection on human trafficking to make it easier for aid organizations to share information.

Graduated to Polaris

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The experience of young people who join violent extremist groups has remarkable similarities, from gangs in Los Angeles to skinheads in Europe to jihadist groups in the Middle East. We created the Against Violent Extremism Network in partnership with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue as a platform for former violent extremists to collaborate, in order to prevent young people from joining extremist groups.

Graduated to ISD

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