Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C)
Established in 2018 with a £300,000 award from Loughborough University’s Adventure Research Programme, the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) applies cutting-edge concepts and methods from social science and information science to understand the role of social media in shaping our civic culture.
Led by Professor Andrew Chadwick, it features academic staff and PhD researchers drawn from the disciplines of communication, information science, social psychology, and sociology.
O3C enables interdisciplinary teams of researchers and PhD researchers to work together on issues of misinformation, disinformation, and the rise of hate speech and intolerance online. It develops evidence-based knowledge to mitigate the democratically-dysfunctional aspects of social media. At the same time, it identifies and promotes the positive civic engagement benefits of social media.