As the end of the academic year approaches, we’d like to look back at some of the Observatory’s highlights from our first year in operation.
With generous funding from the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, the London Social Media Observatory launched in December 2025.
From this point onwards, we’ve accomplished a lot, from events to publications, to conference presentations, and continuing partnerships and projects!
Here’s a condensed overview of some of our highlights from this past year:
December 2025:
We started the year with an exciting event hosted in partnership with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy at Stewart House on the 8th of December. Together, we convened 2 expert roundtables on the emerging risks to democratic participation on TikTok. The discussions were later synthesised into a briefing paper on the topic.
January 2026:
After the winter break, we commenced our internal lab meetings, an initiative rotating between weekly reading sessions; presentations from internal and external speakers; and methods training led by our data engineer. Since starting in January, we have covered topics from the politics of podcasts, to ideological biases in identifying misinformation, to bias in AI news summaries; and honed skills in text classification using transformers and LLMs. We also welcomed our first PhD candidate, Sophia Knight!
February 2026:
We continued our lab meetings by hosting exciting external presentations from our collaborators on political identity in digital environments, and on laughter and the use of toxic language in podcasts. We also connected with Members of Parliament on several topics, including promoting better access to platform data for independent researchers; online harm and social media functionality restrictions; and enhancing digital and media literacy.
March 2026:
On the 18th of March, the Observatory hosted a stakeholder meeting on influencers and politics, with attendees from the Electoral Commission, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard, and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, to discuss co-production research opportunities among our research network.
April 2026:
In April, the Observatory announced our inaugural policy fellow, Seyi Akiwowo! Bringing a wealth of experience from the tech governance space, Seyi’s ongoing appointment is generously supported by the Royal Holloway Social Science Impact Accelerator, which has allowed us to work closely on developing a governance framework capable of identifying and mitigating systemic digital risks during elections.
May 2026:
In May, we hosted our first research gathering with 9 external speakers on a range of topics related to social media and politics research. Topics covered in this session included: government control of media (Molly Roberts, UCSD); fatal media and hyper-individualism (Ben O’Loughlin, RHUL); the digital manipulation economy (Jon Roozenbeek, Cambridge); political identity and trust in LLMs (Chris Barrie, NYU); and, fact checking using GrokAI (Mohsen Mosleh, Oxford).
June 2026:
Towards the end of the academic year, the Observatory was on the move! Andreu Casas and Georgia Dagher visited Bucharest as part of the data collection component of the WHAT-IF Horizon project (Work Package 3) on ideological biases in identifying misinformation and comparing misinformation inoculation interventions. Several members of the Observatory also attended the inaugural European Political Science Society conference in Belfast, where 5 papers were presented.
July 2026:
As we step into summer, the Observatory has connected with several civil society stakeholders on a range of issues from online safety, to Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), and enhancing digital literacy, which is especially important with the introduction of a new Prime Minister. We continue to work closely with the UKRI Social Platforms Data Access Taskforce to promote better access to social media data to conduct independent research on online political safety.
Future:
Thank you to all of our collaborators for their amazing support, we are so excited to see what the future holds!
External Speakers:
- Chris Barrie (NYU CSMAP); Calvin Yixiang Cheng (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford); Sofia Collignon (Queen Mary, University of London); Ben Guinaudeau (Université Laval); Liz Hallgren (Annenberg School For Communication, University of Pennsylvania); Mohsen Mosleh (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford); Melina Much (NYU CSMAP); Anne Rasmussen (King’s College London); Molly Roberts (University of California, San Diego); Jon Roozenbeek (University of Cambridge); Kylan Rutherford (NYU CSMAP); Sanaz Talaifar (Imperial College London); Yan Xia (University of Warsaw)
Conferences & Workshops:
- DSA40 Access Days (Berlin, Sep 2025); Digital Democracy Workshop (Zurich, Nov 2025); Navigating Digital Democracy conference (Bournemouth, Jan 2026); DIGISURVOR Workshop (Manchester, Jan 2026); PSA Annual Conference (Oxford, Mar/Apr 2026); Content Moderation, Free Speech & Democracy Workshop (Munich, Apr 2026); EPSS Annual Conference (Belfast, Jun 2026); WHAT-IF Annual Meeting (Bucharest, Jun 2026)
Stakeholder Engagement:
- Westminster Foundation for Democracy; UK Electoral Commission; Ofcom; Full Fact; Maldita.es; LearnToCheck; FairVote; Online Safety Act Network; ElectHer; UKRI Task Force on Researcher Access to Platform Data; Members of the UK House of Commons and House of Lords; Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation
Publications:
- When Conservatives See Red but Liberals Feel Blue: Labeler Characteristics and Variation in Content Annotation (Journal of Politics)
- Bottom-Up? Top-Down? Determinants of Issue Attention in State Politics (Journal of Politics)
- Do the regional and European content of legislation shape party behaviour in national parliaments? An analysis of the Spanish case (Territory, Politics, and Governance)
- Commentary: How do we get platforms to share data with independent researchers? Regulation alone will not cut it: a commentary on Livingston et al.(2023), Bourgaize et al.(2025) (Child and Adolescent Mental Health)
- Opening the black box of the Spanish legislative Process: The Legislative Amendments Dataset (1996-2023) (Data in Brief)
Policy Briefs & Media Outreach:
- Briefing Paper on TikTok, Politics, and Elections (WfD-LSMO)
- Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. Takeover? (Good Authority)