Oxford Social Media Observatory (OSMO) launched in December 2025 under the direction of Dr Andreu Casas. We relocated from Royal Holloway, University of London, to the Department of Politics and International Relations and the Oxford Internet Institute in September 2026.
OSMO is a multidisciplinary research unit leveraging computational methods to examine social platforms’ role in politics. Our main research areas include:
- Curation and moderation of political content
- Misinformation and information operations
- Political agendas, issue framing, and media effects
We also develop and test novel methods for collecting, processing, and analysing social media data, including building efficient pipelines for data storage, retrieval, and collection, as well as training Large (Visual) Language Models to annotate vast quantities of social data.
We engage regularly with key stakeholders and policymakers, and we nurture the next generation of computational social scientists at Oxford through methods training and presentations from both internal and external speakers in our Lab Meeting series.
At the Department, we work closely with the Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods (CASSM) to contribute our expertise in computational social science methods to their research agenda.
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