Natalie Bazarova

Professor Bazarova leads the Cornell Social Media Lab (SML), which investigates the dynamic relationship between communication technology and social behavior across various socio-technical contexts. The SML’s work involves designing, implementing, and evaluating interventions to enhance online privacy and safety, promote digital and AI literacy, and encourage prosocial behaviors in social media. By integrating multidisciplinary perspectives, her research examines how people interact with new affordances and modalities of communication technologies and the resulting changes and effects on people’s well-being and social behaviors. These insights have informed her work on building and evaluating tools and interventions to promote safe and productive engagement with technologies for youth and other vulnerable populations, including asylum seekers and refugees, older adults susceptible to information manipulation and cybersecurity risks, teenagers who have experienced digital harms and abuse, and people with psychological distress and history of self-injury. She directs Social Media TestDrive, an experiential digital literacy program dedicated to teaching youth digital literacy skills, and co-directs the Digital and AI Literacy Initiative, whose goal is to design, evaluate, and disseminate community-driven and evidence-based solutions that promote the public’s critical and informed engagement with technologies.