Samuel Woolley

Samuel C. Woolley is an assistant professor (by courtesy) in the School of
Information and an assistant professor in the School of Journalism, both at
the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the project director for
propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement (CME) at UT.

Woolley is currently a research associate at the Project for Democracy and
the Internet at Stanford University. He has held past research affiliations
at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford and the Center for
Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at the
University of California at Berkeley.

Woolley's research is focused on how emergent technologies are used in and
around global political communication. His work on computational
propaganda, the use of social media 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 tools such as bots and
trending algorithms and tactics of disinformation and trolling in efforts to
control information flows online. His research on digital politics,
automation/AI, social media, and political polarization is currently
supported by grants from by Omidyar Network (ON), the Miami Foundation, and
the Knight Foundation. His past research has been funded by the Ford
Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the New
Venture Fund for Communications, and others.

His latest book, The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break
the Truth, was released in January 2020 by PublicAffairs (US) and
Octopus/Endeavour (UK). It explores the ways in which emergent
technologies--from deep fakes to virtual reality--are already being leveraged
to manipulate public opinion, and how they are likely to be used in the
future. He proposes strategic responses to these threats with the ultimate
goal of empowering activists and pushing technology builders to design for
democracy and human rights.

He is currently working on two other books. Manufacturing Consensus (Yale
University Press) explores the ways in which social media, and automated
tools such as bots, have become global mechanisms for creating illusions of
political support or popularity. He discusses the power of these tools for
amplification and suppression of particular modes of digital communication,
building on Herman and Chomsky's (1988) integral work on propaganda. His
other book, co-authored with Nicholas Monaco, is titled Bots (Polity) and is
a primer on the ways these automated tools have become integral to the flow
of all manner of information online.

Woolley is the co-editor, with Philip N. Howard (Oxford) of Computational
Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on
Social Media, released in 2018 by the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics
series at Oxford University Press. This volume of country specific case
studies explores the rise of social media--and tools like algorithms and
automation--as mechanisms for political manipulation around the world. He has
published several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and white papers on
emergent technology, the Internet and public life in publications such as the
Journal of Information Technology and Politics, the International Journal of
Communication, A Networked Self: Platforms, Stories, Connections, The
Political Economy of Robots: Prospects for Prosperity and Peace in an
Automated 21st Century, The Handbook of Media, Conflict and Security, and Can
Public Diplomacy Survive the Internet? Bots, Echo Chambers and
Disinformation.

Woolley is the founding director of the Digital Intelligence Lab, a research
and policy oriented project at the Institute for the Future, a 50-year-old
think-tank located in Palo Alto, CA. Before this he served as the director of
research at the National Science Foundation and European Research Council
supported Computational Propaganda Project at the Oxford Internet Institute,
University of Oxford. He is a former resident fellow at the German Marshall
Fund's Digital Innovation Democracy Initiative and a former Belfer Fellow at
the Anti-Defamation League's Center for Science and technology. He is a
former research fellow at Jigsaw, Google's think-tank and technology
incubator, at the Center Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington's
Schools of Law and Information, and at the Center for Media, Data and Society
at Central European University.

His public work on computational propaganda and social media bots has
appeared in venues including Wired, the Guardian,TechCrunch, Motherboard,
Slate, and The Atlantic. For his research, Woolley has been featured in
publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the
Guardian and on PBS: Frontline, BBC's News at Ten, and ABC's Today. His
work on computational propaganda and bots has been presented to members of
the U.S. Congress, the U.K. Parliament, NATO, and others. His Ph.D. is in
Communication from the University of Washington. His website is
samwoolley.org and he tweets from @samuelwoolley.