The Center for Media Engagement is thrilled to announce the launch of our propaganda division. Under the direction of Dr. Samuel Woolley, propaganda research will focus on how emergent technologies are used in and around global political communication. Woolley’s work on computational propaganda—the use of social media and other digital tools in attempts to manipulate public opinion—has revealed the ways in which a wide variety of political groups in the United States and abroad have leveraged tech such as bots and trending algorithms and tactics of disinformation and trolling in efforts to control information flows online.
Woolley is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin as well as the program director of propaganda at the Center for Media Engagement. He has affiliations as a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford and as a research affiliate at the Project for Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University. He has held research fellowships at the German Marshall Fund, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Google Jigsaw, the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab, and Central European University’s Center for Media, Data, and Society.