Samuel Woolley Keynote Speaker

Dr. Samuel Woolley is a writer, researcher and speaker who does work on propaganda, emerging technologies and life online. He is the author of four books on related subjects. He was among the first people to uncover systematic manipulative uses of social media during major events worldwide.

He has worked with numerous academic institutions (Oxford, Stanford, Berkeley), private companies (GSK, Allianz, Nestle), governmental entities (US Congress, UK Parliament, NATO), and civil society groups (German Marshall Fund, National Endowment for Democracy, Brookings Institution) to translate the complex research on digital disinformation and artificial intelligence to effects on everyday life. He has given talks and hosted workshops on pressing informational and technological challenges at venues including Princeton University, SXSW, Google and the United Nations.

Woolley’s most recent book, Manufacturing Consensus: Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity, was published by Yale University Press in 2023. He is working on another monograph, Encrypted Propaganda: Coordinated Influence on Chat Apps, under contract with University of Chicago Press. He is the author of three other books: Bots (Polity, 2022), The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth (PublicAffairs, 2020) and Computational Propaganda (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Woolley regularly writes publicly about propaganda, influence and the new digital technologies. His essays and editorials have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Guardian, MIT Tech Review, the Atlantic, Wired, Slate, TechCrunch and numerous other venues. For his research, he has been featured on PBS’ Frontline, NBC’s Today show and BBC’s News at Ten and in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Financial Times.

Dr. Woolley is currently the William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair of Disinformation Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to this, he was an associate professor in the School of Journalism & Media and the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He has past academic affiliations with the Project on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, and at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.

Woolley is the founding director of the Communication Technology Research Lab (CTRL) at Pitt, the Propaganda Research Lab at UT Austin, and the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future. He is co-founder and the former director of research of the Computational Propaganda Project at the University of Oxford. He has held research fellowships at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, GLOBSEC, the Anti-Defamation League, Google Jigsaw, the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington, and the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University. His research has been supported by large grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and others. He has testified on his work before the U.S. Congress and his research has informed policy in a number of countries around the world.

His PhD is from the University of Washington.