Meysam Alizadeh

Meysam Alizadeh

Senior Researcher

University of Zurich

Welcome!

I am a Senior Researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich. Prior to this, I held postdoctoral appointments at Harvard University, Princeton University, and Indiana University. I obtained my PhD in Computational Social Science from George Mason University, where I was affiliated with the Social Complexity Lab and served as a visiting researcher at the Social Dynamics Lab at Cornell University. I also hold an MSc in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh, with additional research affiliation at the Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

My research sits at the intersection of AI, Computational Social Science, and Governance. My work develops frameworks for evaluating emergent capabilities, safety, and alignment in LLMs and investigates the broader sociotechnical conditions that shape their safe and ethical integration into society.

Download my CV .

Interests
  • Computational Social Science
  • LLM
  • Privacy
  • AI Safety & Alignment
Education
  • Ph.D. in Computational Social Science, 2016

    George Mason University

  • M.Sc. in Information Science, 2012

    University of Pittsburgh

  • M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering, 2009

    Amirkabir University of Technology

  • B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering, 2007

    Amirkabir University of Technology

News

  • November 2025 — Invited talk at The Future of Social Media Research Workshop, University of Oxford.
  • October 2025 — Joined the Program Committee for The Web Conference 2026, Research Track on Social Networks and Social Media.
  • May 2024 — Invited talk at the workshop What Policies Can Promote Healthy AI? (Consensus Event, Austin, TX).
  • June 2023 — Invited talk at the Digital Services Act Stakeholder Event, European Commission, Belgium.
  • May 2023 — Interview with France 24 on “Twitter: All to the Right under Elon Musk?”.

Ongoing Research

Work in Progress

  • Meysam Alizadeh “Adversarial LLM Search Engine Optimization on Social Media”.
  • Meysam Alizadeh “Benchmarking LLM Agents Authentication and Authorization Protocols Against Adversarial Attacks”.

Pre-Prints

Publications

(2025). Open-Source LLMs for Text Annotation: A Practical Guide for Model Setting and Fine-Tuning. Journal of Computational Social Science, 8(1), 1–25.

DOI

(2025). How Negative Media Coverage Impacts Platform Governance: Evidence from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Political Communication, 42(2), 1–19.

DOI

(2024). Comparing methods for creating a national random sample of Twitter users. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 14(160).

DOI

(2023). ChatGPT outperforms crowd-workers for text-annotation tasks. PNAS, 120(30), e2305016120.

DOI

(2023). Monetization of social media engagements increases the sharing of false (and other) news but penalization moderates it. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 13703.

Open Access

(2022). Content Moderation as a Political Issue: The Twitter Discourse Around Trump’s Ban. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2.

DOI

(2022). Conspiracy theories on Twitter: emerging motifs and temporal dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, 13, 315–333.

DOI

(2020). Content-based features predict social media influence operations. Science Advances, 6(3), eabb5824.

DOI

(2019). Psychology and Morality of Political Extremists: Evidence from Twitter Language Analysis of Alt-Right and Antifa. EPJ Data Science, 8:17.

DOI

(2017). Generating Spatial Social Networks. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 23(3), 362–390.

DOI

(2016). A Utility Theory Approach for Insurance Pricing. Accounting, 2(4), 151–160.

DOI

Teaching

University of Zurich

  • Digital Public Governance, BA/MA Seminar, Spring 2026.

University of Maryland Baltimore County

  • Introduction to Data Analysis, BA/MA Seminar, Spring 2010.

University of Tehran

  • Curriculum Design: Developed the full curriculum for M.A. and Ph.D. programs in Computational Social Science, Department of Computer Engineering, 2022.
  • Introduction to Computational Social Science, Lecture, Fall 2020.

Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences

  • Workshop: Social Data Analysis, Spring 2022.

Sharif University of Technology

  • Workshop: AI in Social Media Research, Summer 2021.

Supervision

  • Dissertation, thesis, and project committees: Aida Mahmoudi (ICSS), Savana Diem (UZH), Hadi Aliahmadi (IUST), Mohammad Ghotbi (UT), Fatemeh Rajabi (AUT), Mahdi Davoudi (IRIBU), Ata Naghedifar (SUT), Masiha Zahedivafa (IUST).
  • Mentorship: Henrietta Toivanen (Princeton), Ali Ghazinejad (IU), Darya Zare (AUT), Alireza Mohammadian (SUT), Parsa Mirtaheri (SUT), Shirin Dehghani (ATU).

Statistics for CSS

Outreach

Mention in outlet Media

Invited Talks

  • Workshop on The Future of Social Media Research, Oxford Internet Institute, 2025.

  • Transversal Research Priorities Areas Keynote Series, University of Zurich, 2024.

  • Workshop on What Policies Can Promote Healthy AI?, Consensus Event, USA, 2024.

  • Workshop on Safeguarding Democracy from Online Disinformation, Digital Services Act Stakeholder Event, European Commission, Belgium, 2023.

  • Microsoft Seminar Series, Microsoft, WA, 2020.

  • Center for Information Technology Policy Seminar Series, Princeton, 2020.

  • Center for Social Media and Politics, NYU, 2019.

Contacts

Office:
Digital Democracy Lab
Department of Political Science
University of Zurich
Affolternstrasse 56, AFL-H-353
8050 Zürich, Switzerland