Understanding Complex Social Systems
How does information spread through users, communities, platforms?
What type of content is amplified by curation algorithm optimized for engagement?
01 Mission
We combine computational
approaches with social insight
to understand collective
behavior and create prosocial
solutions for online spaces.
How can we design social platforms that facilitate civic discourse? Do online environments foster extremism, conspiracy theories, and the spread of misinformation? What can citizens do to combat hate online? What is amplified by content recommendation algorithms? And how can we leverage generative AI to extract information at scale, understand how humans experience and regulate their emotions, and simulate social systems, and automate the computational reproduction of research? These are questions we currently ask – and answer in the lab.
02 Research
Designing Prosocial Online Spaces
How can we design online spaces that are engaging and prosocial?
Can platform design allow disagreement without rewarding hostility?
Curating Open Datasets for Computational Social Science
What frames are news around the world producing?
What are people consuming on TikTok?
Developing Methods for Computational Social Science
Can we simulate a social system using agentic models?
How can genAI help us measure human behavior reliably at scale?
03 Blog
04 Selected Publications
peer-reviewed article
Collective moderation of hate, toxicity, and extremity in online discussions
PNAS Nexus (2025) DOI peer-reviewed article
Designing social media content recommendation algorithms for societal good
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2025) DOI peer-reviewed article
From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians
Nature Human Behaviour (2023) DOI
05 Outreach
ExhibitionFebruar 2026
Entangled in Democracy
Exhibition on shared reality, platform power, and who controls the digital world.
ESC Graz, FH Joanneum
