The Dynamic Online Networks Lab is an interdisciplinary research group of physicists, political scientists, linguists, computer scientists, and data scientists. We work at the cutting edge in the science of the online multiverse, mapping and quantifying its collective behavior across scales, platforms, topics, and languages. We focus on online mis/disinformation, trust and communication, measuring the impact of generative AI tools in online behavior, and assessing risks/uncertainty. We develop ‘many body’ descriptions for the dynamical formation and evolution of online social structures, their narratives, and the diffusion of content across the online multiverse. One current project is figuring out how (or how not) to communicate official information during an international crisis. Click here to read our Literature Review.

The importance of our work to the scientific community has been recognized by the leadership of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society.

Our work is mostly funded by the U.S. Department of Defense AFOSR (Minerva and Computational Mathematics) and the John Templeton Foundation (in collaboration with Professor Sergey Gavrilets at the University of Tennessee DySoC), with some additional funding from the National Science Foundation. We have been published in journals such as Nature, and have been covered by media outlets such as The New York Times, Newsweek, and NPR.


Visualizations of the Anti-Vaccine Network