About Us

Established in February 2018 with an initial award from Loughborough University’s Adventure Research Programme, the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) seeks 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 students to work together on issues of misinformation, disinformation, polarization, enmity, unwarranted distrust, and online harms. It develops evidence-based knowledge to mitigate the democratically dysfunctional aspects of social media. At the same time, it identifies the positive civic engagement benefits of social media.

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.

O3C asks:

• 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 aim to create high-quality research and findings that are rigorous but also impact public debate and policy.

O3C Core Academic Staff

• Professor Andrew Chadwick, Professor of Political Communication, Department of Communication and Media, O3C Director.
• Portia Akolgo, Research Assistant, Everyday Misinformation Project, Department of Communication and Media (Leverhulme-funded).
• Professor Louise Cooke, Professor Emerita of Information & Knowledge Management, Centre for Information Management (CIM).
• Professor John Downey, Professor of Media and Communication, Department of Communication and Media.
• Dr Suzanne Elayan, Lecturer in Information Management, CIM.
• Dr Natalie-Anne Hall, Postdoctoral Researcher, Everyday Misinformation Project, Department of Communication and Media and O3C (Leverhulme funded).
• Dr Brendan Lawson, Lecturer in Communication and Media and former Postdoctoral Researcher, Everyday Misinformation Project, Department of Communication and Media (Leverhulme funded).
• Professor Tom Jackson, Professor of Information and Knowledge Management, CIM.
• Dr Johannes Kaiser, Ipsos Germany, and former Postdoctoral Researcher, O3C (Swiss National Science Foundation funded).
• Professor Line Nyhagen, Professor of Sociology, Department of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy.
• Dr Martin Sykora, Senior Lecturer in Information Management, CIM.
• Dr Cristian Tileagă, Reader in Social Psychology, Department of Communication and Media.

Current O3C Doctoral Researchers

• Harvey Dodds (O3C funded)
• Andrew Ross (ESRC funded)

Graduated O3C Doctoral Researchers

• 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 MP, 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.

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You can follow O3C on Twitter.

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 current postdoctoral researcher (Hall) and research assistant (Akolgo) are funded by the Leverhulme Trust as part of a grant to Andrew Chadwick. A former postdoctoral researcher (Kaiser) was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, supervised by Andrew Chadwick, and now works for Ipsos and retains an affiliation with O3C. Four of O3C's PhD students were funded by Loughborough. One of its PhD students (Ross) is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council's Midlands Graduate School DTP.