John P. Wihbey

John P. Wihbey is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University, where he serves as Director for Administration and Operations at the Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy (IIID) and Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab). He is Special Advisor for Strategic AI Initiatives in the Office of the Chancellor, a Faculty Researcher at the Ethics Institute, and an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. 

His latest book is Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech – and What Comes Next (MIT Press, Fall 2025). John has served as a research consultant for foundations, government, and social media companies. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of AI and communications; news and social media; emerging media technologies; computational journalism and visualization; media literacy; and tech policy. Author of The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2019), John directed Northeastern’s graduate programs in Media Innovation and Data Communication, Journalism, and Media Advocacy from 2019 to 2024.

His writing and research have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, as well as New Media & Society, ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Journalism Practice, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, International Conference on Web and Social Media, Computation + Journalism Symposium, and International Conference on Social Media and Society. He is also a media analyst whose commentary has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, CBC, NPR, Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), and Caixin Global.

Research/Publications Highlights

• “Bridging the News and Social Media Divide: An Emerging Imperative for Democracy,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, December 2025
• Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech – and What Comes Next, MIT Press, October 2025
• “AI vs. AI: The Upcoming Arms Race against Disinformation Online,” Big Think (book excerpt), October 2025
• “AI Simulations of Audience Attitudes and Policy Preferences: ‘Silicon Sampling’ Guidance for Communications Practitioners,” (co-author) AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES), September 2025
• “AI Across America: 50‑State Attitudes on AI Usage, Job Impact, and Federal Regulation,” (co-author) Civic Health and Institutions Project (CHIP50), August 2025
• “AI-centered Communications Consulting with Civil Society Organizations: Case Studies and Preliminary Lessons Learned” (co-author) AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES), July 2025
• “TikTok in a Time of Peril: American Usage Patterns and Demographic Trends,” (co-author) Internet Democracy Initiative, The Civic Health and Institutions Project (CHIP50) Report, January 2025
• “The Origin of Public Concerns over AI Supercharging Misinformation in the 2024 US Presidential Election” (co-author) Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, January 2025
• “2024 US Elections: Sources of News and Information,” (co-author) The Civic Health and Institutions Project (CHIP50) Report, November 2024
• “Emerging Consensus on Digital Dynamics: Knight Research Network in Year 4,” John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Report, October 2024
• “The Algorithmic Knowledge Gap within and between Countries: Implications for Combatting Misinformation,” (co-author), Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, September 2024
• “Discrediting Health Disinformation Sources: Advantages of Highlighting Low Expertise,”(co-author), Journal of Experimental Psychology, September 2024
• “AI and Epistemic Risk for Democracy: A Coming Crisis of Public Knowledge?” Trinity College Conference on Democracy’s Mega Challenges, April 2024
• “The Future of Research on Social Technologies,” (contributor) Computing Community Consortium, Workshop Visioning Report, April 2024
• “Social Media’s New Referees?: Public Attitudes Toward AI Content Moderation Bots Across Three Countries” (co-author), Ethics Institute Working Paper, Northeastern University, January 2024
• “How Americans See AI: Caution, Skepticism, and Hope,” (co-author), Northeastern University AI Literacy Lab, October 2023
• “Marketplace of Ideas 3.0?: A Framework for the Era of Algorithms” (co-author), Richmond Journal of Law & Technology, 2023
• “Social Media Regulation, Third-Person Effect, and Public Views: A Comparative Study of the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Mexico” (co-author), New Media & Society, 2022
• “The Emerging Science of Content Labeling: Contextualizing Social Media Content Moderation” (co-author), Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2022
• “Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audience” ( co-author), International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2022
• “Backfire Effects after Correcting Misinformation Are Strongly Associated with Reliability” (co-author), Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2022
• “Divergent Global Views on Social Media, Free Speech, and Platform Regulation: Findings from the United Kingdom, South Korea, Mexico, and the United States” (co-author), Ethics Institute Working Paper, Northeastern University, January 2022
• “Explanatory Journalism: Bringing Greater Interpretation and Depth to Complex Issues,” Chapter 5 in Hopkinson, K. M., & Dahmen, N. S. (Eds.), Reporting Beyond the Problem: From Civic Journalism to Solutions Journalism, 2021
• “The Case for Video Animation in Local TV News: Summary Report for Newsrooms” (co-author), Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, November 2021
• “The Bipartisan Case for Labeling as a Content Moderation Method: Findings from a National Survey” (co-author), Ethics Institute Working Paper, Northeastern University, September 2021
• “Informational Quality Labeling on Social Media: In Defense of a Social Epistemology Strategy” (co-author), Yale Journal of Law and Technology, September 2021
• “Sizing Up ‘Media Twitter’: Exploring Population Extent, Beats, and Utility of Social Media” (co-author), ICOMTA’21 – The 2021 International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies, September 2021
• “Digital Democracy: Accelerating a New Field of Knowledge,” John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Report, January 2021
• “Open Data for Better Research on Social Media Platforms” (co-author), The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, December 2020
• “Source Attribution: Recovering the Press Releases behind Health Science News,” (co-author), International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), May 2020.
• “Visualizing Diversity: Data Deficiencies and Semiotic Strategies,” (co-author), Chap. 21 in Engebretsen, M. &  Kennedy, H. Data Visualization in Society, May 2020.
• “High School Student Views on the First Amendment: Trends in the 21st Century” (co-author), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Report, November 2019
• “Net Neutrality,” Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd Edition, November 2019
• “Breaking News and Younger Twitter Users: Comparing Self-Reported Motivations to Online Behavior” (co-author), SMSociety ’19 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society, July 2019
• “The Local-Mobile Paradox: Missed Innovation Opportunities at Local Newspapers” (co-author), Newspaper Research Journal, May 2019
• The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World , MIT Press, April 2019
• “Reinventing Local TV News: Innovative Storytelling Practices to Engage New Audiences” (co-author) Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, February 2019
• “Newsroom Textual Analysis and Visualization Tools Built With R Shiny,” (co-author) Computation + Journalism Symposium, February 2019
• “Credentialing Issues,” The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, May 2019
• “The Social Silos of Journalism: Twitter, News Media, and Partisan Segregation,” (co-author) New Media & Society,  October 2018
• “Process of Simulating Tree Rings for Immigration in the U.S.,” (co-author) Berlin: IEEE VIS Arts Program Annotated Projects, 2018
• “How Students Engage with News,” (co-author) Project Information Literacy Research Institute, October 2018
• “Funding the News: Foundations and Nonprofit Media,” (co-author) Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, June 2018
• “ Predicting News Coverage of Scientific Articles,” (co-author) Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2018
• “State-level Policies for Personal Financial Disclosure: Exploring the Potential for Public Knowledge on Conflict-of-Interest Issues,” (co-author) Law & Policy Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Conference, August 2017
• “Collaborative, Open, Mobile: A Thematic Exploration of Best Practices at the Forefront of Digital Journalism,” (co-author) Storybench.org Project, Northeastern University School of Journalism, May 2017
• “Knowing the Numbers: Assessing Attitudes among Journalists and Educators about Using and Interpreting Data, Statistics, and Research,” (co-author) #ISOJ — The Official Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, April 2017
• “Journalists’ Use of Knowledge in an Online World: Examining Reporting Habits, Sourcing Practices and Institutional Norms,” Journalism Practice, November 2016
• “Communicating about Climate Change with Journalists and Media Producers,” (co-author) Oxford Research Encyclopedias – Climate Science, January 2016
• “The Challenges of Democratizing News and Information: Examining Data on Social Media, Viral Patterns and Digital Influence,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, June 2014
• “Who Gets a Press Pass? Media Credentialing Practices in the United States,” (co-author) Berkman Center Research Publication, Harvard University, June 2014

Selected media publications:

• “America Must Regulate Social Media,” Time, October 2025
• “Governing Babel: John Wihbey on Platforms, Power, and the Future of Free Expression,” Tech Policy Press, October 2025
• “How AI-Driven Search May Reshape Democracy, Economics, and Human Agency,” (co-author) Tech Policy Press, August 2025
• “Storytelling + STEM!: Northeastern’s new Master of Science (M.S.) in Media Innovation & Data Communication,” Storybench.org, August 2022
• “Reinventing Local TV News Part I: The Case for Video Innovation and Animation,” RTDNA, June 2021. Accompanying research slides for download
• “Content Labeling: ‘Soft’ Interventions and Hard Public Problems,” Yale Law School/Knight Media Forum, December 2020
• “Mobile Matters — and Publishers Must Remember That, Even When Resources Are Limited,” Poynter, June 21, 2019
• “How to Save the News Media,” The Atlantic, April 1, 2019
• “Prescription for Journalists from Journalists: Less Time Studying Twitter, More Time Studying Math,”  The Conversation, May 1, 2019
• “It Is Really Hard to Know What is Real,” Nieman Reports, Oct. 16, 2018
• ” 200 Years of U.S. Immigration Looks Like the Rings of a Tree,” National Geographic, June 28, 2018
• “The Syrian Migrant Crisis You’ve Never Heard of—and Why It Matters Today,” Pacific Standard, March 9, 2017
• “There Are Huge Holes in How the U.S. States Investigate Politicians’ Conflicts of Interest,” The Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2017
• “Why It’s So Hard to See Politicians’ Financial Data,” The New York Times, Oct. 4, 2016
• “Big Data’s Impending Struggle to Combat Climate Change,” Pacific Standard, April 23, 2016
• “From ‘Facebook Revolution’ to ‘Twitter Jihad’: Five Years on, How We Got from Tunisia and the Arab Spring to Where We are Now,” Pacific Standard, Dec. 17, 2015
• “The Looming Battle for Clean Data,”  The Boston Globe, Nov. 22, 2015
• “Does the Secret to Social Networking Lie in the Remote Jungle?” The Boston Globe, Oct. 4, 2015
• “Agricultural Drones May Change the Way We Farm,” The Boston Globe, Aug. 22, 2015
• “At Sea in a Deluge of Data,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 7, 2014
• “Rethinking Viral: Why the Digital World is Not as Democratic as We Think,” Pacific Standard, June 9, 2014
• “Aaron Swartz and the Cause of Openness,” The Boston Globe, Jan. 8, 2014