McCourt School’s Massive Data Institute and Bright Data Partnering on Big Data and Public Policy Innovation

The collaboration brings together MDI’s research expertise and Bright Data’s massive public web datasets and automated collection tools. This multi-year agreement aims to bridge the gap between data access and data needs of researchers, enabling researchers to analyze real-world digital imprints to tackle urgent problems, like strengthening democratic integrity, combatting deepfakes and improving humanitarian responses.“

“While we have built a number of data collection and processing tools at MDI, we recognize the need to have a partner who wants to support the research and policy work we do at MDI and conducts ethical data collection of public social media data. We are so excited to begin this partnership with Bright Data,” says Lisa Singh, the director of MDI.

Building on the “Datathon for Democracy”

The formal agreement comes on the heels of a successful pilot event in March 2026 led by Thessalia Merivaki, Associate Research Professor at MDI: the inaugural Datathon for Democracy, a partnership between The Bright Initiative by Bright Data, MDI and IBM. The event focused on two interconnected challenges related to fighting misinformation in elections: detecting deepfakes and identifying gaps in the communication strategies used to counter them.

During the event, 45 graduate students used Bright Data’s marketplace to analyze over 70,000 social media posts, developing multiple AI-driven prototypes using IBM’s agentic AI tools to detect “inauthentic content” and map hyperlocal gaps where official responses to misinformation were delayed or absent. The datathon provided students with hands-on experience with Bright Data tools and data sets and IBM’s data pipeline. Election and policy Insights were presented and judged. 

“The most urgent challenges facing democracy: deepfakes, disinformation, gaps in civic communication, are hiding in plain sight in public web data. What’s been missing is getting that data into the right hands at the right time. MDI brings the research expertise; we bring the data infrastructure and ethical collection standards. Together, we can turn public digital signals into real-world policy impact,” said Dana Mazia, General Manager, The Bright Initiative by Bright Data.

A Multi-disciplinary Engine for Innovation

The partnership is designed to be cross-functional, involving computer scientists, social scientists, and policy experts. Under the terms of the agreement, MDI researchers can utilize Bright Data APIs and data sets at a reduced cost, while benefiting from dedicated technical support and the Bright Academy’s educational resources.

About Bright Data and the Bright Data Initiative: Bright Data is the world’s leading web data infrastructure company, trusted by over 20,000 organizations to ethically collect public web data at scale. Through The Bright Initiative, they empower academic institutions and civil society with the state-of-the-art tools needed to drive global “Data for Good” projects. The Bright Initiative by Bright Data, is Bright Data’s Global Data for Good program that provides over 800 nonprofits, academic institutions and public bodies with pro-bono access to public web data and expertise to drive positive global change.

About the Massive Data Institute (MDI): At Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, the Massive Data Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute that connects experts across computer science, data science, public health, public policy and social science to tackle societal scale issues and impact public policy in a way that improves people’s lives through responsible evidence-based research.