Oxford Internet Institute

This project seeks to understand the health of the UK online information ecosystem, including tracking the spread of divisive and misleading content.

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Since 2012, they have been investigating the use of algorithms, automation, and computational propaganda in public life. Political bots are manipulating public opinion over major social networking applications. This project enables a new team of social and information scientists to investigate the impact of automated scripts, commonly called bots, on social media. They study both the bot scripts and the people making such bots, and then work with computer scientists to improve the ways they catch and stop such bots.

Since the Project on Computational Propaganda was founded in 2012, we’ve observed increased scrutiny being placed on governments and tech platforms to combat the problem of disinformation. With mounting pressure, these institutions have started to mobilize substantial resources to investigate and manage this issue. The development of useful tools and resources for civil society groups, however, has been slower.