Anonymous Online Survey Detection (and Journalist Verification) of Political Violence, Social Unrest, and Human Rights Violations: Results from Bangladesh and Pakistan

Multiple large bodies of scholarship engage with questions directly concerned with political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses. Yet, efforts to collect data on these variables are fraught with challenges, and many extant empirical findings rely on data (particularly news report based events) suspected of or known to be biased in aggregate. We explore the use of anonymous, online surveying to detect otherwise unobserved activity. We run anonymous, online surveys in Bangladesh and Pakistan in the run up to, during and in the period following recent contentious 2024 elections in both countries and, separately, in the immediate aftermath of Bangladesh’s 2024 Student–People’s Uprising and expulsion of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. To assess the efficacy of the surveys, we partnered with professional journalists working on both countries to verify the authenticity of reported incidents. Results confirm their effectiveness in uncovering many instances of political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses otherwise likely to be missed or excluded from major news media reporting and ultimately major datasets derived from it. Yet, they also suggest that anonymous online survey responses and leading event datasets effectively complement, rather than substitute for, one another. Such surveys can be deployed rapidly to communicate with some of the most difficult to reach populations globally about the most sensitive political issues of interest to social scientists and policy professionals.