About Us

Established in February 2018 with an initial award from Loughborough University’s Adventure Research Programme, the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) ran until February 2025. With funding from the Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, and the Swiss National Science Foundation, O3C provided cutting-edge research that helped in the broader global effort to understand the role of social media in reshaping civic culture.

In the post-2016 era, across the world, we face fundamental questions about how digital media are reshaping the civic cultures of democracies. Central to the debate is whether the features of social media that enable citizens to express themselves, exchange opinions, coordinate with others, and rapidly circulate and recirculate messages also encourage the diffusion of false information, intolerance, and hatred.

Led by Professor Andrew Chadwick, O3C worked on issues of misinformation, disinformation, polarization, enmity, unwarranted distrust, and online harms. It developed evidence-based knowledge to mitigate the democratically dysfunctional aspects of social media.

Under the umbrellas of two projects—the New Crisis of Public Communication Project and the Everyday Misinformation Project—O3C pioneered research on the complex factors that shape the spread of misinformation online and it showed the importance of understanding online personal messaging platforms such as WhatsApp—the most popular platform in the UK—in the spread of misinformation. It examined the changing nature of deception; biases and vulnerabilities in the attention economy; post-truth identities; disinformation-based misogynist extremism; the role of social media exposure and conspiracy mentality in Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy; the role of deepfakes in distrust of media; and the role of social media exposure in explaining the spread of false and misleading information during UK election campaigns. Respected opinion polling and market research company Opinium were O3C's data partners, providing pro bono services and paid services, the latter as part of a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

O3C asked:

• What are the conditions for democratically dysfunctional outcomes to occur online?
• What are the effects of social media platform affordances on the civic character of life online?
• How can we escape the despair of the disinformation crisis and rebuild trust in public communication and a more positive digital future for all?

By answering these questions we produced high-quality research and findings that were rigorous but also impacted public debate and policy.

O3C featured a Doctoral programme with Loughborough academic staff and PhD researchers drawn from the disciplines of communication, information science, social psychology, and sociology.

O3C Doctoral Researchers

• Harvey Dodds (O3C funded)
• Andrew Ross (ESRC funded)
• Dr Rachel Armitage (O3C funded). Now an Online Safety Policy Associate working for Ofcom.
• Dr Catherine R. Baker (O3C funded). Now a postdoc at Dublin City University’s Anti-Bullying Centre (ABC).
• Dr Dayei Oh (O3C funded). Now a postdoc at the Datafication Research Initiative at the University of Helsinki's Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities.

International Advisory Board

• David Babbs, Clean Up the Internet.
• Rob Berkeley MBE, BlkOutUK.
• Professor Leticia Bode, Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University, USA, an expert on online misinformation and its correction.
• Duncan Brown, Shift Design
• Dr Emily Dickinson, Opinium Research 
• Julie Elliott, then MP and member of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee and Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Digital Skills.
• Professor Phil Howard at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University and the leader of its Programme on Democracy and Technology.
• Carl Miller, Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at the Demos think tank.
• Professor Rebekah Tromble, George Washington University.
• Professor Josh Tucker, Director of the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab at New York University.

Background and Funding

The Online Civic Culture Centre began as a Loughborough Doctoral College initiative, part of Loughborough University's Adventure Research Programme, and part of the CALIBRE research framework, the Communication and Culture Beacon, and the Decision Sciences Ambition. Its postdoctoral researchers (Hall) and research assistant (Akolgo) were funded by the Leverhulme Trust as part of a grant to Andrew Chadwick. A postdoctoral researcher (Kaiser) was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, supervised by Andrew Chadwick. Four of O3C's PhD students were funded by Loughborough. One of its PhD students (Ross) was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council's Midlands Graduate School DTP.