Magdalena Wojcieszak is a professor of communication at the University of California, Davis, and a researcher at the Center for Excellence in Social Science at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Designated Emphasis in Computational Social Science and a member of the Graduate Group in Computer Science at UC Davis. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Wojcieszak examines how people select (political) information online; the effects of mass and digital media on extremity, polarization, and (mis)perceptions; and also pro-social interventions to users and platform algorithms. She has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for the project NEWSUSE: Incentivizing Citizen Exposure to Quality News Online: Framework and Tools; before she directed ERC Starting Grant EXPO: Exposure to Dissimilar Views: Investigating Backfire Effects at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. She also leads several other projects on algorithmic audits and computational interventions to identify and minimize harmful content on YouTube.
Magdalena Wojcieszak has authored or co-authored around 90 articles in peer-reviewed journals (including Nature, Science Advances, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, among others). She is the associate editor of Political Communication (and previously served this role for Journal of Communication) and is part of an independent research partnership between researchers and Meta to study the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the U.S. 2020 elections, known as the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study. She has received several awards for her teaching and research, including being named the 2023 Fellow of the International Communication Association.
Research interests: political communication, platform algorithms, social media, information selection