Sean Gourley is co-founder and CTO at Quid. Sarah Pilewski is head of intelligence services. Quid partnered with Knight Foundation on an analysis of civic tech in the 2013 report “The Emergence of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field.” Today, during the 2014 Forum on Communications and Society, Gourley will deliver an early draft of Quid’s findings from a new project with Knight to help build understanding around the current debates on Internet policy. The meeting, held Aug. 10-13 at the Aspen Institute and sponsored by Knight, is part of Knight’s commitment to a stronger Internet, including the News Challenge, which concluded in June.

Quid and Knight Foundation first worked together last year to create “The Emergence of Civic Tech” report, an experimental project that leveraged big data and network theory to show how the allocation of philanthropic capital could be used to influence the growth of emerging technology spaces.

We’re thrilled to work with Knight on a new challenge, and to continue exploring how we can apply big data and network theory for social impact. In contrast to our first report, which focused on investment dynamics, we are currently attempting to study a subject even harder to define – namely the flow of ideas and influence between the worlds of technology and politics.

Knight has asked us to explore the public narratives around net neutrality. Our goal is to explore the discussion of net neutrality across news outlets and social media, breaking down the key messages that are propagating about this issue. How do the conversations differ by media platform, or across demographics? Who’s engaged in the discussion, and who is not? Who are the major influencers? Ultimately, we aim to provide Knight with a mechanism to amplify the impact of its partnerships, funding and marketing messages, and empower American people.

Answering these questions requires tying together signals across many disparate sources – news, blogs, Twitter, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) comments, and funding for lobbying, to name a few. We’ve only just begun digging into this data, but today we present a sneak peek of a few insights that have started to emerge:

The Quid intelligence platform has scanned 50,000 news sources and 200,000 blogs from Jan. 1 to July 18, 2014, and analyzed the ideas from 8,500 unique articles about net neutrality. We were able to make use of some new natural language processing techniques to start to identify clusters of persistent ideas that have been central to the net neutrality debate. The top six of these narratives are as follows:

1.     Don’t give us an Internet of haves and have-nots.

2.     Higher costs for consumers. “Don’t make me pay more for Netflix.”

3.     The FCC is a political organization with too many conflicts of interest.

4.     It’s a David and Goliath battle: startups versus cable companies.

5.     The Internet is a right and should be treated like utilities such as electricity.

6.     There should be no “free lunch” for content providers.

The data shows us that the conversation in mainstream media has focused heavily on the impact of net neutrality on the consumer. For example, the media is more likely to draw on the example of higher Netflix costs than to question the impact on political engagement or access to ideas. The media coverage for net neutrality is dominated by tech sources at 39 percent of total volume (compared with the 2 percent expected from a random sample), and the conversation has failed to make a significant impact on local news space with just 1 percent of the net neutrality conversation appearing there (A random sample indicated it would be much higher, 27 percent). It is also interesting to see that financial sources are not choosing to cover the topic in detail, with only 6 percent of the narrative being driven by finance as compared to the 17 percent of news volume expected from a random sample.

The mainstream media landscape provides one lens into the conversation around net neutrality, but social media such as Twitter provides another one. Analyzing the conversation on Twitter we see that it is being utilized as a platform for grassroots activism. In an analysis of the 20,000 latest #netneutrality tweets (from June 22 – July 22), Quid found that 80 percent of the top retweets are calling users to action.

We’ve also started to drill into the 1.1 million comments that were submitted to the FCC about net neutrality, which were made available for download on Aug. 5. This data provides a fascinating insight into a range of different American voices on the issue. We  found that more than 30 percent of these comments are template responses that have been cut and pasted from five major advocacy groups. Stripping these away we see that the original comments reflect the narratives being told within mainstream media. The largest cluster of comments focuses on how the pay-to-play system proposed by some will harm diversity on the Internet (15 percent of the comments), while the second major cluster looks at the need for equality in promoting the American dream (7 percent).

I leave you with open questions on who’s missing from this debate. Based upon a statistical analysis of user names, we estimate that 27 percent of Twitter users using the #netneutrality hashtag are women. This ratio is echoed in the FCC comments, where approximately 29 percent of comments are from women. Looking at the ratio of sources discussing net neutrality, we see that people who largely consume news through local sources would be missing out on this debate as well.

What are the narratives that will engage these audiences? What are the right channels to reach them? What can civil society do that will drive change in this debate? Over the next several weeks, we’ll be mapping these signals together to tackle these questions. Stay tuned.

The Aspen 2014 Forum on Communications and the Society (FOCAS) involves about 30 people from the worlds of commerce, philanthropy and libraries and public service — and you; the meeting will be live streamed here, and you can preview the full agenda here. It begins at 10:45 a.m. EDT Aug. 11.