Social Media and Democracy: A Panel Discussion with Joshua Tucker and Shelby Grossman

How have the emergence and proliferation of social media technologies reshaped the political landscape in the US?  How do they facilitate new and evolving strategies for disseminating political disinformation?  Our two distinguished speakers will address these and related questions by introducing us to some of their recent research.

About the speakers

Joshua Tucker is Professor of Politics at New York University. His research has appeared in in over two dozen scholarly journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Social Media and Society, and Science. Through his work at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics and SMaPP lab, both of which he co-founded, Professor Tucker has been at the forefront of efforts to explore the effects of social media on political participation and politics, as well as developing methods for utilizing social media data to study politics in new ways. Professor Tucker is also one of the co-editors of The Monkey Cage, a political science and policy blog published at The Washington Post.

Shelby Grossman is a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory and co-editor of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. Her primary research interests are in online political disinformation, the political economy of development, and Africa. Her articles appear or are forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, Political Communication, and PS: Political Science and Politics(among others). Her book, The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: How the State Shapes Private Governance, was published with Cambridge University Press. Shelby was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis from 2017-2019 and received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016.