What Is Trustworthy Social Media?

A statement by project leads Anima Anandkumar and Michael Alvarez

Trustworthy Social Media is new publication from our group computer science and social science researchers, who are working together to return civility to discourse on social media, to help find and prevent online trolling and harassment, and to use AI to uncover misinformation and disinformation campaigns online. We also are working to show how we can use social media data productively for academic research.

We believe that social media trolling, harassment, and misinformation are some of the most important social, political, and economic issues of our time. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have become important tools that people around the world us to communicate and get their news, they are widely used for e-commerce and advertising, and have become important mechanisms for politicians to use campaign for office and stay connected to their constituents.

Our research effort is a collaboration between the research groups of computer scientist Anima Anandkumar and social scientist Michael Alvarez, both faculty members at the California Institute of Technology. We have post-doctoral scholars, graduate students and undergraduates who have been working with us for over the past year to initiate and sustain a variety of related research efforts that all are aimed at producing a more trustworthy social media.

We plan on using this Medium publication to give readers some insight into our work-in-progress, to discuss the research that our team and others are conducting in this area, and to also discuss the policy and social implications of our work. We’ve built a project website where we have links to the various components of our research project, our papers and other research products, and where we introduce the members of our research group.

Stay tuned to Trustworthy Social Media.