Ctrl-F-Resist. Practices, Challenges, and Technical Needs of Civil Society Organizations Monitoring the Far-Right Online
TL;DR
The manual labor trap is introduced as an empirically grounded concept that explains why monitoring CSOs tend to remain locked into labor-intensive, low-capacity arrangements.
Abstract
As far-right actors increasingly exploit online platforms to disseminate ideology and mobilize supporters, civil society organizations (CSOs) play a vital yet under-recognized role in monitoring antidemocratic dynamics online. Unlike fact-checkers or content moderators, CSOs engage in long-term, contextualized analysis, often in resource-constrained settings and under precarious working conditions. Despite their critical societal role, CSOs face significant barriers to adopting or co-developing technical solutions, including legal uncertainty, limited platform access, and chronic underfunding. Existing research and tool development efforts have largely overlooked these actors in favor of more institutionally embedded stakeholders. This paper addresses this gap through a qualitative study with 15 practitioners from 12 Germany-based CSOs engaged in online monitoring, positioning them as key yet overlooked stakeholders in the governance of digital spaces. We explore their current practices, challenges, and expectations regarding technological support. Our findings show that monitoring remains largely manual due to the lack of tailored tools, with enhanced search capabilities emerging as the most pressing technical need. While participants express openness to AI-supported features such as media processing and content discovery, many remain skeptical of automated classification, citing concerns around trust, legal usability, and professional credibility. Grounded in these findings, we introduce a conceptual monitoring workflow and describe its implementation in an open-source Telegram monitoring prototype designed to flexibly support diverse monitoring goals. To account for the sociotechnical character of CSO monitoring, we outline concrete design recommendations as well as recommendations for policymakers and academic research. In addition, we introduce the manual labor trap as an empirically grounded concept that explains why monitoring CSOs tend to remain locked into labor-intensive, low-capacity arrangements, and propose to develop a CSCW-grounded theory of collaborative sociotechnical scaling to better understand both the promise and challenges of collaboration as a pathway beyond fragmented, labor-intensive monitoring work.
