This project turns the lab's research findings into things the public can actually use — simulated environments where young people meet a manipulative post, a pile-on, or a deceptive account under conditions where nothing is at stake yet.
Social Media TestDrive gives students a realistic social media environment to rehearse in. DART extends the same logic to deception and disinformation resilience. SocialSim opens the underlying experimental platform to other researchers, so behavioural intervention work does not require every lab to rebuild the instrument first.
The design problem throughout is honesty: a simulation that teaches by tricking its users teaches the wrong thing. Work here keeps returning to how to build ecologically valid practice that does not rely on deceiving the people it is meant to protect.
Themes across projects
- AI-mediated learning and communicationAlso in Imagined Futures of GenAI in Education
- Synthetic media, and what an end user can actually do once detection is possible but unusableAlso in Misinformation & Community Norms
- Methodological pluralism — questions shape methods, not dogmaShared by every project
Publications
Published
- 2024
Social Media Co-pilot: designing a chatbot with teens and educators to combat cyberbullying
Zou, Yang, DiFranzo, Chen, Hui & Bazarova · International Journal of Child–Computer Interaction 41, 100680
- 2019
Social Media TestDrive: real-world social media education for the next generation
DiFranzo, Choi, Purington, Taft, Whitlock & Bazarova · CHI 2019, Glasgow
- 2025
SocialSim: an open source platform for conducting behavioral intervention research on social media
Agha, Martinez, Ali, DiFranzo & Wisniewski · CSCW 2025 Companion, 528–531