person
Samuel Woolley
Dr. Samuel Woolley is the research director of the digital intelligence (DigIntel) Lab at the Institute for the Future, a 50-year-old think tank located in the heart of Silicon Valley. He is a research associate at CITRIS, UC Berkeley and at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He specializes in the study of automation/AI, political communication, and information warfare. Sam is a co-founder and the former research director of the Computational Propaganda (ComProp) research team at the University of Oxford and the University of Washington. He and his collaborators have done foundational research on the topics of online disinformation and political manipulation, coining the terms ‘computational propaganda’ and ‘political bot’.
Sam is a current Belfer Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League and at the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington. He is a former fellow at Google Jigsaw, IFTF and the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University. He has published research papers with several research venues and has written commentary pieces for venues including Wired, theAtlantic, and Motherboard. For his research, he has been featured in publications such asthe New York Times, the Washington Post,and the Guardianand on CBS’ 60 Minutes, BBC’s News at Ten, and NBC’s Nightly News. His work has been presented to the US Congress and the UK Parliament.