Our co-director, Joshua Tucker, has co-edited a volume exploring the field of social media research with Nathaniel Persily, co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. The text chronicles the recent explosion of research at the intersection of social media and democracy — and the resulting new field that brings together political scientists, economists, psychologists, communication scholars, and other researchers from different corners of academia. The book, out September 2020, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Click through to read the final chapter, which details the legal barriers preventing access to key social media datasets, and the ethical quandaries [...]

In recent months, the global COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic, exposing shortcomings not only in the diffusion of high quality information through online networks, but also in our understanding of who is most susceptible to believing false and misleading information during times of crisis. With the support of the NSF RAPID Grant, we seek to study to study susceptibility to false and misleading news around COVID-19, as well as to test how the new pandemic environment impacts assessment of the veracity of news – both COVID-related and political – over the course of the 2020 election [...]

We’re thrilled to announce that  NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics has received $400,000 from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, an organization that supports public charities and other organizations in areas such as journalism, voter protection, women in technology, veterans and military families. $350,000 is going to Center for Data Science PhD student support, and $50,000 is going towards Politics PhD student support.

We’ve launched a Medium publication! We’ll use the platform to bring you quick, digestible summaries of our published research (such as this one on echo chambers), thoughtful Q&As with our researchers (here’s our co-director, Joshua Tucker, on the future of social media research in the age of COVID-19), and broader insights from our growing community of researchers (here’s our framework for safeguarding researchers who study harmful content).