News

Anatoliy Gruzd and his team at Dal's Social Media Lab are devising new ways to analyse us how social media influences society — and their latest work hits very close to home for the lab's director.

In a talk earlier this month, Dr. Gruzd applied his expertise in social media analytics to recent events in the Ukraine, his home country that he left a decade ago, to show that the role of social media in political movements is expanding and changing.

Dr. Gruzd's work focuses on analyzing data generated by online user activities to learn about how people communicate and interact via the Internet and what impact this has on society. One aspect of this research is analysing how different social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, are used to engage different groups of people.

“We at the Social Media Lab are interested in examining how different platforms enable online and offline groups to grow, how social media can be used to track disasters and other events in real time, and how information and misinformation are spread online,” says Dr. Gruzd, whose lab is located in the Faculty of Management’s School of Information Management.

Read the rest of the article on Dal News.