John P. Wihbey

John P. Wihbey is an associate professor of media innovation and technology in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University, a faculty researcher at the Ethics Institute, and a founder of Northeastern’s Internet Democracy Initiative. John is the author of The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2019) and a forthcoming book (2025) about global content moderation policy and social media. From 2019 to 2024, he directed Northeastern’s graduate programs in Media Innovation and Data Communication, Journalism, and Media Advocacy. He has served as a research consultant for Twitter, Inc., John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. 

John’s research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of news and social media; emerging media technologies; public knowledge levels and media consumption; computational journalism and visualization; misinformation and media literacy; and policy issues relating to social media platforms. He serves as Lead Investigator for the Ethics of Content Moderation Project at the Ethics Institute, which is exploring social media, misinformation, and governance issues.

His writing and research have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, as well as New Media & Society, 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, 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.

John has worked in news media, including for The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.) and the NPR show “On Point” (WBUR-Boston), served as an advisor to social media companies, and was an assistant director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where he helped found the Journalist’s Resource project. He has also served on the advisory board of Project Information Literacy. An affiliate of the Northeastern School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, John co-founded Northeastern’s Co-Lab for Data Impact. He was general co-chair of the Computation + Journalism Symposium in 2020 and 2021, and again in 2024. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College (magna cum laude); and holds an M.A. from Middlebury College, an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) from Northeastern University, with a research concentration in higher education administration and organizational communication and learning. 

Research/Publications Highlights

• “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
• “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:

• “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