What Google searches can tell us about the global human rights movement

Geoff Dancy, an associate professor of political science at U of T Mississauga, used Google Trends to research where in the world people are most interested in human rights (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn) - When  Geoff Dancy  wanted to research where people are most interested in human rights, he fully expected it would come from countries in the Global North - such as Canada and the United States. But when Dancy - an associate professor in the University of Toronto Mississauga's department of political science - and his colleague delved deeper into the topic, they discovered the total opposite was true: it is those in the Global South, who regularly face suffering and violence at the hands of their governments, who consistently search online for information about human rights.   "Our expectations were completely flipped on their head," Dancy says. "It goes against this academic narrative that exists right now that human rights aren't from - and don't resonate in - the Global South. We found the exact opposite of that."  Dancy, along with his colleague Christopher Fariss , an assistant professor in the University of Michigan's department of political science, detail their findings in a new paper published in  The American Political Science Review . As part of their research, Dancy and Fariss used the Google Trends analytics tool, which collects aggregated data on what people are searching for on Google. They examined Google searches from between 2015 and 2019 for the term "human rights," looking at data from 109 countries and across five languages.