Project

The Truman Platform is a social media simulation platform that was made by the Cornell Social Media Lab. This interactive model allows for researchers have complete control over the social media simulation. They’re able to simulate realistic timelines by having complete control over each user, customize the interface of the simulation, and collect a large variety of participant behaviors.

It was named after the well-known movie from 1998, The Truman Show. The Truman Platform allows for researchers to have a community research infrastructure to do social media experiments in realistic environments. These researchers are able to create different social media environments with specific features that fit into their research goals that still allow participants to have a natural social media experience.

Because the Truman Platform prevents the participants from actually interacting with each other on these simulated social medias, researchers are able to have ‘lab-like’ control over the study while also creating realistic media settings.

Current team members include Dominic DiFranzo of Lehigh University, Natalie Bazarova of Cornell University, Qian Yang of Cornell University, Winice Hui of Cornell University, Philipp Masur of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Inhwan Bae of Cornell University, and Jessie Jia of Cornell University.

Past team members include Marie Ozanne of Cornell University, Pengfei Zhao of Cornell University, Beichen Ma of Cornell University, and Asad Nabi of Cornell University.