The Social Computing Lab is based in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Our goal is to make the internet fairer, safer, and more inclusive. We contribute empirical evidence that guides design and policy solutions to improve platform governance.

Ongoing projects

• [NSF-funded] Taking a user-centered approach to incorporate fairness, accountability, and transparency in flagging mechanisms at each stage — before, during, and after flagging.
• Designing, building, and analyzing the use of personal moderation tools. Exploring psychosocial factors that influence the adoption of these tools.
• Examining the accessibility challenges of using safety tools on social media sites.
• Studying public perceptions of community-wide moderation interventions, including community bans and warning labels that precede community access.
• Understanding how offline perceptions of race influence exposure, processing, and responses to race-based hate speech online.
• Analyzing social media users’ engagement with inappropriate speech by politicians.
• Examining how content moderation influences gender performativity on Chinese platforms.
• Evaluating the effects of deplatforming 150 offensive influencers on their Wikipedia page views and Google searches.
• Understanding how social media affordances normalize caste inequalities.
• Using social psychology and communication theories to design warning labels against inappropriate content on social media sites and evaluate them.

People

Principal investigator: Shagun Jhaver

Postdoc: Alyvia Walters

PhD students: Meilun Chen, Yunhee Shim

PhD semester project students: Matthew Ackerman, Sudhamshu Hosamane, Nayana Kirasur, Alice Zhang (CMU)

Active collaborators: Tawfiq Ammari, Britt Paris, Robert West (EPFL)

Come work with us!

I am looking to accept 1-2 doctoral students starting Fall 2025. If you are a prospective PhD student interested in working with me, please apply to the Rutgers SCI PhD program and mention me in your application materials.

If you are a current PhD, Master’s, or undergraduate student at Rutgers interested in working with me, please email me (sj917 [at] rutgers [dot] edu) with your CV/resume and research interests. I use various methods in my research — interviews, surveys, online experiments, and large-scale data analyses. Please indicate your skills and experiences related to any of these methods.

I am particularly interested in working with students who want to work on the following:

1. Any of the ongoing projects (listed above)
2. Extending an ongoing project in the lab
3. Exploring new ideas on the topic of content moderation or addressing online harms