Making Sense of a Networked World since 2010

The Social Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research center at Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University. The lab studies how social media and other digital technologies are transforming how people and organizations communicate, …

share information, conduct business, and form communities, as well as the impact these changes have on society. The lab’s research seeks to advance the public’s understanding of the benefits and potential drawbacks of technology adoption.

Recent Posts

Two-thirds of Canadians have experimented with generative AI, but most don’t understand its impacts

When ChatGPT entered the public imagination in 2022, Canadians were curious, hopeful, anxious and had plenty of questions. Just three years later,...

The Hidden Game: How Scammers Use “Chameleon Ads” to Bypass Meta’s Moderation

Over the last few weeks, a series of stories by The Guardian, CBC, and The Logic has highlighted an explosion of fraudulent Facebook and Instagram ads...

[New Report] The State of Generative AI Use in Canada 2025: Exploring Public Attitudes and Adoption Trends

TORONTO — April 2025 — A majority of Canadians (66%) have experimented with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools less than three years after ChatGPT’s public...

Two-thirds of Canadians have experimented with generative AI, but most don’t...

When ChatGPT entered the public imagination in 2022, Canadians were curious, hopeful, anxious and had plenty of questions. Just three years later,...

[New Report] The State of Generative AI Use in Canada 2025: Exploring Public Attitudes...

TORONTO — April 2025 — A majority of Canadians (66%) have experimented with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools less than three years after ChatGPT’s public...

“I Have Read and Agreed to the Terms…” A New Look...

It’s often said that one of the biggest lies on the web is "I have read and agree to the Terms".
Social Media Research Toolkit
A list of 50+ social media research tools curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab. Only tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies are included.
Communalytic is a research platform for studying online communities and online discourse. It can collect and analyze public data from various social media platforms including Reddit, Twitter, and CrowdTangle (Facebook/Instagram). It uses advanced AI, text, social network analysis techniques to automatically analyze posts’ content, pinpoint toxicity, detect bots, assesses sentiments, and discover comms networks.
Netlytic
Netlytic is a text and social networks analyzer that can automatically summarizes public conversations and discover communication networks from social media posts. It uses various APIs to collect public posts from Twitter, YouTube and RSS feed. It can also support the analysis of your own datasets via .text/.csv. files.
Visit the Russia-Ukraine Misinfo DashboardConflictMisinfo.org