David Lazer
(he/him/his)
Distinguished Professor, Interdisciplinary with College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Research interests
- Computational social science
- Network science
- Collective cognition
- Political networks and deliberative democracy
- Social media and social influence in networks
- Predictive modeling
Education
- PhD in Political Science, University of Michigan
- BA in Economics, Wesleyan University
Biography
David Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of political science and computer science at Northeastern University, jointly appointed between the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.
Lazer is interested in computational social science and social networks, with a focus on misinformation and political communication. He co-directs the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern's center for digital humanities and computational social science. He is co-lead of the COVID states project — which charted public opinion in all 50 states through the pandemic — as well as the co-founder of Volunteer Science, a citizen science project to study human behavior. Lazer is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a visiting scholar at the Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Lazer's work has been covered by hundreds of news outlets, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News. His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and the American Political Science Review. His most recent book, "Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy," authored with Michael Neblo and Kevin Esterling, examines potential reforms to improve the deliberative potential of US democracy.
Lazer has been the principal investigator on more than $13 million of grants from the NSF, ARL, ARO, IARPA, and other entities. He has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, and as a member of numerous other editorial boards and program committees.
Recent publications
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Towards global equity in political polarization research
Citation: Max Falkenberg, Matteo Cinelli, Alessandro Galeazzi, Christopher A. Bail, Rosa M. Benito, Axel Bruns, Anatoliy A. Gruzd, David Lazer, Jae K. Lee, Jennifer McCoy, Kikuko Nagayoshi, David G. Rand, Antonio Scala, Alexandra Siegel, Sander van der Linden, Onur Varol, Ingmar Weber, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Fabiana Zollo, Andrea Baronchelli, Walter Quattrociocchi. (2025). Towards global equity in political polarization research CoRR, abs/2504.11090. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.11090 -
DomainDemo: a dataset of domain-sharing activities among different demographic groups on Twitter
Citation: Kai-Cheng Yang, Pranav Goel, Alexi Quintana Mathé, Luke Horgan, Stefan D. McCabe, Nir Grinberg, Kenneth Joseph, David Lazer. (2025). DomainDemo: a dataset of domain-sharing activities among different demographic groups on Twitter CoRR, abs/2501.09035. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.09035 -
When Randomness Beats Redundancy: Insights into the Diffusion of Complex Contagions
Citation: Allison Wan, Christoph Riedl, David Lazer. (2024). When Randomness Beats Redundancy: Insights into the Diffusion of Complex Contagions CoRR, abs/2411.07907. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.07907 -
Mainstream News Articles Co-Shared with Fake News Buttress Misinformation Narratives
Citation: Pranav Goel, Jon Green, David Lazer, Philip Resnik. (2023). Mainstream News Articles Co-Shared with Fake News Buttress Misinformation Narratives CoRR, abs/2308.06459. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.06459 -
Enhancing the ethics of user-sourced online data collection and sharing
Citation: Michelle N. Meyer, John Basl, David R. Choffnes, Christo Wilson, David M. J. Lazer. (2023). Enhancing the ethics of user-sourced online data collection and sharing Nat. Comput. Sci., 3, 660-664. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00490-7 -
The science of fake news
Citation: David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David M. Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, Jonathan L. Zittrain. (2023). The science of fake news CoRR, abs/2307.07903. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.07903 -
Engagement Outweighs Exposure to Partisan and Unreliable News within Google Search
Citation: Ronald E. Robertson, Jon Green, Damian Ruck, Katya Ognyanova, Christo Wilson, David Lazer. (2022). Engagement Outweighs Exposure to Partisan and Unreliable News within Google Search CoRR, abs/2201.00074. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.00074 -
(Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public Opinion Surveys
Citation: Kenneth Joseph, Sarah Shugars, Ryan J. Gallagher, Jon Green, Alexi Quintana Mathé, Zijian An, David Lazer. (2021). (Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public Opinion Surveys EMNLP (1), 312-324. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.27 -
Misinformation in action: Fake news exposure is linked to lower trust in media, higher trust in government when your side is in power
Citation: K. Ognyanova, D. Lazer, R. E. Robertson, and C. Wilson. (2020). "Misinformation in action: Fake news exposure is linked to lower trust in media, higher trust in government when your side is in power". Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. DOI: 10.37016/mr-2020-024
