Our Team

John P. Wihbey is an Affiliated Faculty Fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change, Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) at Northeastern University and an associate professor of media innovation and technology in the College of Arts, Media and Design. He is also a faculty researcher at the Ethics Institute and a co-founder of Northeastern’s Internet Democracy Initiative, which is set to become the Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy (IIID).

His forthcoming book is Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech – and What Comes Next (MIT Press, Fall 2025). He has served as a research consultant for foundations, government, and social media companies. From 2019 to 2024, he directed Northeastern’s graduate programs in Media Innovation and Data Communication, Journalism, and Media Advocacy. 

Author of The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2019), John has research and teaching interests that focus on the intersection of news and social media; emerging media technologies; computational journalism and visualization; media literacy; and tech policy. He has been Lead Investigator for the Ethics of Content Moderation Project at the Ethics Institute, which is exploring social media, information integrity, and governance issues.

His writing and research have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, as well as New Media & Society, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Journalism Practice, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, International Conference on Web and Social Media, and International Conference on Social Media and Society. He is also a media analyst whose commentary has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, CBC, NPR, Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), and Caixin Global.

John has worked in news media, including for The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.) and the NPR show “On Point” (WBUR-Boston), and was an assistant director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where he helped found the Journalist’s Resource project. An affiliate of the Northeastern School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, John co-founded Northeastern’s Co-Lab for Data Impact. He was general co-chair of the Computation + Journalism Symposium in 2020 and 2021, and again in 2024. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College (magna cum laude); and holds an M.A. from Middlebury College, an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) from Northeastern University, with a research concentration in higher education administration and organizational communication and learning.