Making Sense of a Networked World since 2010

The Social Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. The lab studies how social media is changing the ways in which people and organizations communicate, disseminate information, conduct business

and form communities, and how these changes impact the social, economic and political structures of modern society. The broad aim of the lab’s various research initiatives is to advance the public’s understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of social media adoption.

Recent Posts

A First Look at Meta’s New Content Library and Content Library API

After years of speculation, Meta officially announced it would shut down CrowdTangle, a research and data-analysis tool widely used...

[New Paper Alert] Just being a bit bitchy: The gendered valences of online anti-social...

Billed as a "gossip forum" that harkens back to the mid-aughts heyday...

[New Paper Alert] Falling for Russian Propaganda: Understanding the Factors that Contribute to Belief...

Ukraine and the West have long been a target of the Kremlin's disinformation campaigns. Since the annexation...
Mastodon Data Collection for Academic Research

Mastodon Data is Now Available via @Communalytic – A no-code computational social science research...

We are thrilled to announce the release of two new Mastodon data collectors in Communalytic:

Inside the Social Media Lab’s Bridging Divides Studies on Online Migration Discourse

The Social Media Lab has recently launched a new initiative to study the impact of mis- and disinformation on immigrants and immigration...

[New Paper Alert] Falling for Russian Propaganda: Understanding the Factors that...

Ukraine and the West have long been a target of the Kremlin's disinformation campaigns. Since the annexation...

The State of Anti-Social Behaviour on Social Media – 31% of...

A Census-balanced Survey (n=1500) About Anti-Social Behaviour on Social Media

The Influence of Influencers in Canada: A Census-balanced Survey About Social...

65% of Canadian adults in our survey (n=1500) reported following social media influencers on at least one social media platform
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