Craig Newmark Philanthropies Donates to NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and NYU’s Center for Data Science
We’re thrilled to announce that CDS and NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics have received $400,000 from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, an organization that supports public charities and other organizations in areas such as journalism, voter protection, women in technology, veterans and military families. $350,000 is going to CDS student support, and $50,000 is going towards Politics student support.
This donation will fund our PhD students and enable them to continue their research projects.
CSMaP supports research in three core areas: 1) the relationship between social media and politics, 2) innovative ways to use social media data to study politics, and 3) developing open-source tools that facilitate the use of social media data for the study of politics.. A key aspect of CSMaP’s success is its talented and cross-disciplinary group of graduate students. The Center’s co-Directors — Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker — have trained its PhD students — who are primarily focused on social science subjects such as politics, sociology, economics, and psychology — on data science methods and techniques. Following the opening of CDS’s PhD program (which launched in 2017) CSMaP recognized the opportunity to train our PhD students in social science theory and methods. This integration of social science and data science is developing a new generation of scholars with the skills necessary to analyze the scale and complexity of the digital trace data, which measures and influences human behavior. This intersection of disciplines improves students’ ability to study the contemporary digital-era ecosystem while also allowing them to choose from a diverse array of both academic and professional career paths.
CSMaP has been seeking funding for PhD students to continue working on a wide range of topics related to the 2020 U.S. Elections, including the following:
- how social media affects political participation
- the spread of politically-related misinformation online
- the relationship between social media political polarization
- the use of social media by political elites
Both CDS and CSMaP are grateful to Craig Newmark Philanthropies and are excited that our students are able to continue their research efforts.
To learn more about CSMaP, please visit its website. For more information on CDS research, please visit our CDS in the News page.
By Ashley C. McDonald
