About

I am an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. I am also member of InFER, the Institute for Empirical-Analytical Research within the Social Science Department (FB03, where I am an affiliated member).

My research focuses on public discourse in online environments and the role of digital media for democratic politics. While integrating psychological and political science perspectives, I use digital trace data and online experiments to better understand social and political phenomena. For example, I am very interested in the dynamics of political participation and expression on social media and what this means for political polarization. Furthermore, I am interested in the role of social media and generative AI for political information environments. Before joining Goethe University, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the field of computational social science at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin where I remain an affiliated researcher.

I hold a PhD in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) from the Hertie School in Berlin. Previously, I graduated from the University of Oxford, UK, with a MSc degree in Social Data Science, and from the University of Kassel, Germany, with a BSc and MSc degree in Psychology.

I am futher interested in

• Public opinion, political trust and political polarization.
• Methodological questions of measurement and causal inference.
• The public perception of climate change, environmental behavior and science communication.
• Platform design interventions, content moderation and platform regulation.

Recent work

Oswald, L., Schulz, W., Hertwig, R., Lazer, D., & Stier, S. (2026). The Tip of the Iceberg: How the Social Media Production-Consumption Gap Distorts Public Opinion for Citizens and Researchers (Frcv5_v2). SocArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/frcv5_v2/

Oswald, L., & Munzert, S. (2026). Little change in a changing landscape: Tracking exposure to untrustworthy news in Germany from 2017 to 2024. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 6, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2026.006

Oswald, L., Schulz, W. S., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2025). Disentangling participation in online political discussions with a collective field experiment. Science Advances, 11(50), eady8022. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ady8022

Oswald, L. (2025). Effects of Preemptive Empathy Interventions on Reply Toxicity Among Highly Active Social Media Users. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000178

Younger-Khan, S., Weidmann, N. B., & Oswald, L. (2024). Consistent effects of science and scientist characteristics on public trust across political regimes. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03909-2

Oswald, L. (2024). More than news! Mapping the deliberative potential of a political online ecosystem with digital trace data. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03115-0

Lorenz-Spreen, P.*, Oswald, L.*, Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01460-1.

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via 🦋Bluesky or 🟦LinkedIn. (You can find me on Mastodon and X but I’m an infrequent visitor there.)