Observatory on Social Media Announces 2022 Knight Fellows
Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, funded in part with a $3 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has named two new Knight Fellows for 2022.
Bao Tran Truong and Jimmy Ochieng will help advance the Observatory’s mission to understand the role of media and technology in society and build tools to analyze and counter disinformation and manipulation on social media. The Observatory on Social Media, or OSoMe (pronounced “awesome”), is a collaboration between the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering; The Media School; and the IU Network Science Institute.
Truong is a Ph.D. student in the Luddy School, working with Filippo Menczer, Distinguished Professor in the Luddy School and OSoMe director. She focuses on understanding the spread of misinformation in networks and investigating its effects on social media users’ news consumption patterns and well-being. “The Observatory on Social Media is a great place to be,” Truong said. “Not only do I get access to top-notch computational facilities but I also get opportunities to meet scholars from many fields such as media, sociology and psychology, which ultimately inform my research.”
Ochieng is a Ph.D. student in The Media School working with Professor Betsi Grabe, the Associate Director of Research at OSoMe. Ochieng focuses on political communication, with a growing interest in citizen evaluations of media trustworthiness in a high-choice and high-contamination information ecosystem. In a recently published article, he studied how news sources influence the attribution of responsibility in the coverage of devolution in Kenya.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Knight Foundation is a national foundation with strong local roots. We invest in journalism, in the arts, and in the success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers. Our goal is to foster informed and engaged communities, which we believe are essential for a healthy democracy. For more, visit kf.org.