University of Michigan School of Information professors Paul Resnick and Eric Gilbert are 2024/2025 visiting scholars at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. 

Visiting faculty members will spend the year investigating urgent social media problems and proposing mitigations for harmful online phenomena. 

UMSI professor and associate dean for research and innovation Paul Resnick will focus his research on interventions that reduce affective polarization, including bridging algorithms which select content that appeals to people who often disagree.

“I'm looking forward to a year of pursuing exciting ideas, both my own and those of other fellows, faculty and staff at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media,” Resnick says. 

Eric Gilbert, UMSI associate professor and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at U-M’s College of Engineering, will be researching social media governance.

“I’m really looking forward to exploring the socio-legal elements of approaches to social media governance. Harvard Law School has some incredible scholars at the intersection of law and the internet," Gilbert says. 

The Institute for Rebooting Social Media is a three-year research initiative to accelerate progress towards addressing social media’s most urgent problems, including misinformation, privacy breaches, harassment and content governance.

Related

Paul Resnick is a Michael D Cohen collegiate professor of information, associate dean for research and innovation and professor of information at UMSI. Learn more about him by visiting his UMSI profile

Eric Gilbert is a John Derby Evans endowed professor of information, associate professor of information and UMSI and an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the College of Engineering. Check out his UMSI profile for more information about his research and work. 

— Noor Hindi, UMSI public relations specialist