Our story
The National Internet Observatory is funded by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation: NSFGrant:Mid-scale RI-1 (M1:IP): Observatory for Online Human and Platform Behavior
Northeastern News has written several articles explaining why the Observatory is so vital for scientists: "Can we better understand online behavior? These researchers will dig deep to find out" (News@Northeastern, October 2021) and "Unprecedented data collection project, 'a huge missing piece of the study of the Internet,' now underway" (News@Northeastern, September 2022).
Lastest media
In April 2023, the 59th Annual Robert D. Klein Lecture at Northeastern was led by cybersecurity expert Christo Wilson.
Contact us
If you have questions about the research project you can contact us directly at help@nationalinternetobservatory.org.
Core team
members
David Lazer
David Lazer is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. He has published prominent work on online information consumption, democratic deliberation, collective intelligence, computational social science, and algorithmic auditing, across a wide range of prominent journals such as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and the American Political Science Review. His research has received extensive coverage in the media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, and CBS Evening News. He is a co-leader of the COVID States Project, one of the leading efforts to understand the social and political dimensions of the pandemic in the United States.
Christo Wilson
Christo Wilson is an Associate Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He is a founding member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern, and serves as director of the BS in Cybersecurity program. Professor Wilson's research focuses on online security and privacy, with a specific interest in algorithmic auditing. Algorithmic auditing is an emerging, interdisciplinary area that uses experimental techniques to measure the black-box algorithmic systems that pervade daily life in order to increase transparency and accountability of these systems. His work is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, a Sloan Fellowship, the Mozilla Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Anti Defamation League, the Data Transparency Lab, the European Commission, Google, Pymetrics, and Verisign Labs.
David Choffnes
David Choffnes is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, and Executive Director of Northeastern’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the ACM/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship, and the Outstanding Dissertation Award in EECS at Northwestern University. His research has been recognized with best paper awards three times (USENIX Security 2017, NDSS 2018, IMC 2019) and two Applied Networking Research Prizes. His work has been covered by the popular press including the New York Times, ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS News, PBS, NPR, the Boston Globe, NBC News, and Science Magazine, and is supported by the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, Measurement Lab, Google, Comcast, Verizon, Arcep, and the Data Transparency Lab.
John Basl
John Basl is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University and an associate director of the Northeastern Ethics Institute leading the institute’s AI and data ethics initiatives. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, both at Harvard University. He is a moral philosopher working primarily in AI and data ethics. He is a co-author of “Building Data and AI Ethics Committees” (published with Accenture) and “Getting from Commitment to Content in AI and Data Ethics: Justice and Explainability” (published with the Atlantic Council).
Michelle N. Meyer
Michelle N. Meyer is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Bioethics and Decision Sciences in the Geisinger College of Health Sciences and Chief Bioethics Officer at Geisinger Health System, where she is also faculty co-director of the Behavioral Insights Team in the Steele Institute for Health Innovation. Her normative and empirical work has been funded by the U.S. NIH, FDA, and NSF and by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and Open Philanthropy; published in Science, Nature, PNAS, and the New England Journal of Medicine; and covered by numerous U.S. and international news outlets. She has also published in the New York Times, Slate, Wired, and the L.A. Times and served on an American Psychological Association blue ribbon commission, multiple NASEM study committees, and the editorial board of Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.