About 

The Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) is an interdisciplinary collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto that studies media ecosystem health. It is the coordinating body of the Canadian Digital Media Research Network (CDMRN), a pioneering initiative launched in June 2023 committed to fortifying and fostering resilience within Canada's unique information ecosystem. Its mission is to understand the dynamics of information production, dissemination, and consumption across digital media with the goal of empowering Canadians to navigate the complexities of the modern digital age. 
MEO has been delivering large-scale information ecosystem research projects in Canada since 2019. It combines large-scale online data analysis with survey research to study how information flows impact citizen’s attitudes and behaviours, and assesses these phenomena on the overall strength of Canadian democracy. Recognizing the distinct challenges posed by misinformation, foreign interference, rising polarization, and growing institutional distrust, our approach is tailored to addressing the diverse research and policy needs of Canada. As a bilingual nation with expansive geographic variation, large diaspora communities, and heavily influenced by the U.S. information environment, Canada requires bespoke initiatives that consider its ecosystem-level characteristics to help ensure effective governance of our increasingly vital digital domain.

The Team

  • Aengus Bridgman is the Director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and an Assistant Professor (Research) at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He is one of Canada’s leading experts on misinformation, digital activism, and the politics of digital media.

    His work has been published in The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Experimental Political Science, Party Politics, The Misinformation Review, Frontiers in Political Science, and The Canadian Journal of Political Science and featured in The New York Times, CBC, the Washington Post, the Post Millennial, Vox, La Presse, Radio-Canada, Le Devoir, and many others.

    For more information on Aengus’ work, check out his professional website https://abridgman.ca/, or follow him on Twitter at @AengusBridgman.

    Aengus can be contacted via email at aengus.bridgman[at]mcgill.ca.

  • Jennie Phillips is an academic practitioner specializing in the intersection between information and communication technologies, society and complex events ranging from humanitarian disasters to global health emergencies to human rights crises. She has her Ph.D. from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and a Master in Education Technology from Concordia University. She has worked as a post-doctoral research fellow with the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health (York University) and a doctoral fellow with the Citizen Lab (University of Toronto). She also taught at York University in the Disaster & Emergency Management program and is the director of the Digital Global Health & Humanitarianism Lab (DGHHLab). Jennie consults nationally and internationally as a practitioner in education, innovation, training and research with public, academic and non-profit sectors. Clients have included the Privy Council Office/Prime Minister’s Office of Canada, Global Affairs Canada, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the German Red Cross, CARE Netherlands and Dalhousie University.

  • Alexei Abrahams is MEO’s digital lead. Alexei is passionate about designing and developing media observatories to help scholars and civil society map the networks that shape our political discourse. He is currently on contract to publish a book on this subject.

    Alexei's expertise in observatories emerges from his years of experience as a social scientist researching disinformation, social media, and cybersecurity. His research covers such diverse regional contexts as North America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, and has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, and the International Journal of Communications. He holds a doctorate in economics from Brown University, and has over a decade of experience conducting empirical research in the social sciences.

    For more information on Alexei's work, check out his professional website sites.google.com/site/alexeiabrahams, or follow him on Twitter at @kalamburshki.

  • Blake Lee-Whiting is the Survey Lead at MEO as well as a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Blake’s research focuses on the politics of technology, survey methods, and the disruptive effects of emerging technologies. Previously, Blake was the interim Managing Director of the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL) at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

  • Thomas Galipeau is a Ph.D. student in the department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Research Fellow in the Policy, Election, and Representation Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Previously, he earned a master’s and a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of Montreal.

    His research delves into the interplay of partisanship, attitudes, and beliefs. his doctoral thesis undertakes a comprehensive exploration of negative partisanship by examining its origins and implications. Additionally, he is also interested in the effects of social media on political behaviour.

    Outside of academia, Thomas spends his time planning his next hiking or camping trip.

    Google Scholar

  • Thomas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is a Research Fellow in the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL) at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Thomas’s research examines how cognition influences information processing, selection, and political behaviours. His dissertation focuses on the implications of empathy in individuals’ opinion formation and behaviours.

  • Professor Peter Loewen is the Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Professor Loewen teaches in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School.

    Professor Loewen is the Director of PEARL, Associate Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute, a Senior Fellow at Massey College, and a Fellow with the Public Policy Forum. For 2020-2022, he is a Distinguished Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Tel Aviv University.

    Professor Loewen received his B.A. from Mount Allison University (2002) and his PhD from l’Université de Montréal (2008). He held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of British Columbia and the University of California at San Diego. Since joining the University of Toronto Mississauga in 2010, he has held visiting positions at the Melbourne School of Government at the University of Melbourne, the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

    From 2016 to 2018, Professor Loewen was the Director of the School of Public Policy & Governance until it was amalgamated with the Munk School of Global Affairs to create the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

    Professor Loewen’s work has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Medicine, Nature Human Behaviour, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Transactions of the Royal Society B, and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and other journals. He has edited four books and is a regular contributor to the media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Globe & Mail, Toronto Star and National Post.

  • Taylor Owen (DPhil, Oxford) is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, The Director of The Center for Media, Technology and Democracy, and an Associate Professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation, a Fellow at the Public Policy Forum, and sits on the Governing Council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

    He was previously an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and the Research Director of Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. He is the author of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2015) and the co-editor of The World Won’t Wait: Why Canada Needs to Rethink its Foreign Policies (University of Toronto Press, 2015, with Roland Paris) and Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State (Columbia University Press, 2016, with Emily Bell). His forthcoming book with Emily Bell will be published by Yale University Press in 2021.

    His work focuses on the intersection of media, technology and public policy and can be found at taylorowen.com and @taylor_owen.

  • Sara is a recent Political Science graduate from McGill University with an extensive background in researching the political implications of social media. She has been published in various journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has spoken about the intersection of politics and technology at McGill University, the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, and Stanford University. You can find her on Twitter at @s_j_parker.

  • Saewon Park is a Senior Data Analyst at MEO. Prior to working for MEO, she worked as a BI analyst in the tech industry most recently at Unity Technologies. She has a master's degree in Political Science from McGill University. She aims to bring her academic and industry knowledge together to her position as a part of MEO's digital team.

  • Zeynep Pehlivan is a data engineer at MEO. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in 2013, with her dissertation centered around web archiving, access methodologies to web archives, and their optimization. She led a work package in an EC funded FP7 project entitled SCAPE - SCalable Preservation Environments for two years.

    During her postdoctoral work at Telecom ParisTech & BnF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France), she had a chance to work on network analysis and visualization techniques for web archives. With a seven-year tenure as a research engineer at INA (Institut National de l’audiovisuel de France), she contributed to social media archiving, mining, and studies concerning information propagation within the French media landscape. She was a part of the OTMedia (Observatoire TransMedia) team at INA spanning the past three years.

    https://zpehlivan.k-ray.ca/

    Twitter

    @Zeynep Pehlivan

  • Danielle Bohonos is a Ph.D. student in the department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Research Fellow in the Policy, Election, and Representation Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She did her master’s and bachelor’s studies in political science at McGill University where she was a member of the interdisciplinary research group, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. She has two very adorable cats named Hades and Misty!

    Danielle's research involves the rise of far-right and populist movements in Canada and the network that connects these ideas across North America more broadly. Her other research interests include rural resentment, Western alienation, and the decline in trust in political institutions.

    LinkedIn

  • Ben is a PhD student in the department of Computer Science at McGill University, mainly based at the Network Dynamics Lab. His research is focused on understanding how people form their opinions online, and how platforms shape that process. He has previously worked in industry as a software engineer, handling and analyzing data at scale in various domains, most recently at Ubisoft. He completed his bachelors and masters at the University of Bristol.

    He loves rock climbing, being in mountains, and making life simulations

    https://bendavidsteel.github.io/Ben's Website

  • Rupinder Liddar is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at McGill University. She is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She holds a master’s degree in Political Science from McMaster University and an honours bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

    Her research interests focus on South Asian political behaviour in Canada with expertise on the Sikh-Canadian diaspora. More broadly, her work centres on visible minority political behaviour in Western diasporas. Her doctoral thesis examines the voting patterns and political attitudes of Sikhs within Canada and in other Western democracies.

    Outside of research, she enjoys reading fiction and playing soccer.

    LinkedIn

  • Shane Littrell, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto in the Policy, Election, and Representation Lab (PEARL) of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He earned his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Waterloo and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in experimental psychology from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). Prior to moving back to Canada, he completed postdoctoral work at the Department of Political Science at the University of Miami and at Teachers College, Columbia University.

    Broadly, his primary research centers on uncovering the metacognitive and socio-cognitive processes crucial for rational thinking and decision-making, with a particular focus on identifying factors underlying both the production of and receptivity to misleading information (e.g., BS, conspiracy theories, “fake news”) in various contexts and applied settings. In his free time, he likes to keep life spicy by making homemade ghost pepper and scotch bonnet hot sauces.

    Personal Website