Hal Roberts

Media Cloud is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media.

As autonomous systems play an increasing role in selecting the content we see online, questions arise about AI's influence on human judgment, opinions, and perceptions.

Blogging Common seeks to capture and present the spirit and wisdom of the blogosphere by surveying bloggers around the globe.

The Berkman Center's Circumvention project is engaged in designing and conducting research aimed at gaining a broad understanding of the usage of circumvention tools.

The Berkman Center partnered with eIFL to deliver a distance learning program on copyright for librarians. The resulting curriculum, made available on March 24, 2010, can be used…

The DDoS research project seeks to understand the ways in which DDoS attacks are becoming a popular technique for limiting access to independent media and human rights sites…

Studying digital media ecosystems and political discourse related to the U.S. presidential election

The Surveillance project is drawing a map of the different forms and impacts of surveillance online. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation and run in collaboration with our partner…

Tracking political discourse in the U.S. for March, April, and May of 2020

Tracking political discourse in the U.S. for January and February of 2020

Working paper explores disinformation campaign about mail-in voter fraud

The most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency

In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election.

A new paper from the Media Cloud team concludes that a diverse set of actors working in conjunction through the networked public sphere played a central, arguably decisive, role…

"Blogs as an Alternative Public Sphere: The Role of Blogs, Mainstream Media, and TV in Russia’s Media Ecology," authored by Bruce Etling, Hal Roberts, and Robert Faris, is the…

This paper uses a new set of online research tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation in the United States designed to give prosecutors and…

This paper summarizes the major findings of a three-year research project to investigate the Internet’s impact on Russian politics, media and society. We employed multiple methods…

Given the rising awareness of the potential of the Internet as a political space and increasing government control over the space, it is easy to understand the widespread interest…

This document includes the full survey results for the Berkman Center’s International Bloggers and Internet Control survey.

Infringements on Internet freedom, particularly through Internet filtering and surveillance, have inspired activists and technologists to develop technological counter-measures,…

Over the past two years, we have undertaken several studies at the Berkman Center designed to better understand the control of the Internet in less open societies. In this paper,…

The recent surge in digital activism that has helped to shape the Arab spring has been met with stiff resistance by governments in the region intent on reducing the impact of…

This paper evaluates the impact of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on independent media and human rights sites in nine countries, as well as the broader impact of…

This paper evaluates the usage of blocking-resistant circumvention tools, simple web proxies, and VPN services and finds that overall usage of circumvention tools is still very…

A large variety of different projects have developed tools that can be used to circumvent Internet filtering, allowing people in filtered countries access to otherwise filtered…

Research shows elites, mass media play an important role in spreading voting misinformation

The Guardian celebrates some of our research as the most important of the year.

Technology can be a threat to the integrity and quality of media, but also a source of potential solutions.

The Berkman Center is pleased to share that Berkman Fellow Hal Roberts and Steven J. Murdoch of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory have edited a collection of papers…

The Berkman Center is pleased to announce that the Media Cloud Dashboard is open for public use. We invite you to experiment with the tool, which generates weekly word clouds of…

The Berkman Center is pleased to share a new report from the DDoS research project: "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites," in…

Berkman Center people and projects have been paying close attention to the role of the Internet and cell phones in the post-election protests in Iran.

The Berkman Center is pleased to make available its report on techniques and tools for circumventing Internet filtering...

This week, over on the newly started "An Eye on Surveillance" blog, the first in a series of posts about egregious privacy intrusions -- "Snooping Browsing History through HTML"...