
Sandra González-Bailón, Ph.D.

- Carolyn Marvin Professor of Communication
- Director, Center for Information Networks and Democracy
Sandra González-Bailón's research looks at how communication networks shape exposure to information and mediate the political process, with ramifications across empirical areas that include non-institutional forms of political engagement; the coordination of information campaigns; and the consumption of news and political content.
Sandra González-Bailón is the Carolyn Marvin Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Director of the Center for Information Networks and Democracy (CIND). Prior to joining Penn, she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (2008-2013). She completed her doctoral degree in Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and her undergraduate studies at the University of Barcelona.
Her research agenda lies at the intersection of computational social science and political communication. Her applied research looks at how online networks and algorithmic curation shape exposure to information, with implications for how we think about political engagement, mobilization dynamics, information diffusion, and the consumption of news.
Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature, Science, Political Communication, The Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She serves as Associate Editor for The International Journal of Press/Politics, Social Networks, and EPJ Data Science. From 2020 to 2022 she served at the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. She is a member of the National Academies Standing Committee on Advancing Science Communication.
Education
- M.S., University of Oxford, 2004
- Ph.D., University of Oxford, 2007
Selected Publications
“Asymmetric Ideological Segregation in Exposure to Political News on Facebook”, Science, 2023.
“Meaningful measures of human society in the twenty-first century.” Nature, 2021.
“Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities.” Science, 2020.
Her full list of publications can be found here.
Courses
- COMM 2130 (formerly 213) Social Media and Social Life
- COMM 3670 (formerly 367) Communication in the Networked Age
- COMM 4070 (formerly 407) Understanding Social Networks
- COMM 5940 (formerly 594) Introduction to Networks
- COMM 6840 (formerly 684) Data Visualization for Research
- COMM 8010 (formerly 801) Filter Bubbles, Long Tails, & Information Cascades: Methodology for a Fragmented Media Environment
- COMM 8510 (formerly 851) Social Media and Political Information
- COMM 4360 (formerly 436) Data Literacy in the Algorithmic Society
- COMM 6120 Meaningful Measures in a Data-Driven World

First Findings from US 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study Released
Unprecedented research by Prof. Sandra González-Bailón and colleagues reveals the influence of Facebook's algorithms on political news exposure.