About

Amy Bruckman is Regents’ Professor and Senior Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on social computing with interests in online collaboration, understanding across differences, and content moderation. She received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 1997 and a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1987. She is a Fellow of The ACM and a member of the SIGCHI Academy. She is also the author of the book “Should You Believe Wikipedia? Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge” (2022).

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Economics
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Knowledge management
• Social psychology
• Law
• Business
• Advertising
• Internet privacy
• Economic growth
• Psychology

Selected publications

• The Prosocial Ranking Challenge: Reducing Polarization on Social Media without Sacrificing Engagement

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-03-20

  preprintOpen access

  We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify which posts were shown to desktop social media users, randomly assigning 9,386 users to a control group or one of five alternative ranking algorithms which simultaneously altered content across three platforms for six months during the US 2024 presidential election. This reduced our preregistered index of affective polarization by an average of 0.03 standard deviations (p < 0.05), including a 1.5 degree decrease in differences between the 100 point inparty and outparty feeling thermometers. We saw reductions in active use time for Facebook (-0.37 min/day) and Reddit (-0.2 min/day), but an increase of 0.32 min/day (p < 0.01) for X/Twitter. We saw an increase in reports of negative social media experiences but found no effects on well-being, news knowledge, outgroup empathy, perceptions of and support for partisan violence. This implies that bridging content can improve some societal outcomes without necessarily conflicting with the engagement-driven business model of social media.

  PublisherDOI

• The Practice of Online Peer Counseling and the Potential for AI-Powered Support Tools

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-05-02 · 5 citations

  article

  What challenges do volunteers providing peer support in online mental health platforms (OMHPs) face in operating and growing their communities? How could the HCI community develop human-AI systems to help? Recent work on online peer counseling has led to the development of novel AI tools for conversational interaction, but it remains unknown how such technology can fit into broader practices that include extratherapeutic tasks. In this research, we conducted interviews and design exercises with seventeen peer counselors from 7 Cups of Tea, a large online therapy and counseling platform, to design tools --- AI or not --- that resolve challenges that arise from day-to-day community practices. Participant responses suggest three classes of tools that could improve online peer counseling: real-time decision support, productivity, and management and training. Investigation of design motivations surfaced four practice-based challenges including chat interface limitations, difficulties in support seeker management, fragmented contexts of practice, and lack of visibility due to privacy concerns. Based on counselors' discussion of benefits and risks associated with AI features in the tools they designed, we offer suggestions for research on AI tools embedded within peer counseling practices, and connect our findings with broader implications about online peer counseling as a form of volunteer-based mental health practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding #vent channels on Discord

  First Monday · 2025-08-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Vent channels on Discord, which are chat channels developed for people to express frustration, can become an informal type of peer support system. This paper is a qualitative study of experiences with vent channels on Discord, examining the experiences of 13 participants through semi-structured interviews. We found that participants were able to meet their needs for social support via vent channels by receiving commiseration, advice, and validation from the responses of others. At the same time, vent channels could lead to frustration when participants have conflicting expectations for their interactions. We suggest ways that Discord or Discord server moderators can provide enhanced structure, clarity, and transparency in order to enable participants to have better experiences in vent channels.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Metrics and Macchiatos: Challenges for Service-Industry Workers and the Need for Worker-Driven ICTs

  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2025-06-12 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Nearly 30 million people work in the foodservice and retail industries in the U.S., representing approximately 18% of the total U.S. workforce. These service-industry workers contend with pressures from algorithmic management and other workplace technologies, yet they typically do not benefit from technologies that might help foster mutual support in the way that white-collar workers do. Recently, Starbucks, a major service-industry employer, has garnered media attention for issues with understaffing, labor law violations, and algorithm-based operations. We conducted interviews with 16 Starbucks employees about their workplace issues, interactions with technology, and communication practices. These interviews illustrate how workplace technologies worsen existing issues for service-industry workers and how challenges to worker-to-worker communication reduce their capacity to rectify these issues, especially at the cross-store level. Our participants want better communication with other workers, such as through labor unions or new information and communication technologies (ICTs), to help improve their working conditions. We discuss how HCI scholars can use action research to help design localized, worker-driven ICTs to facilitate more connectivity and collaborative practices outside of the workplace. We conclude by outlining our ongoing work studying and designing ICTs for service-industry workers.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding Online Discussion Across Difference: Insights from Gun Discourse on Reddit

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-09-06 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In this paper, we study discussions of gun policy on Reddit, with the overarching goal of developing insights into the potential of the internet to support understanding across difference. We use two methods: a clustering analysis of Reddit posts to contribute insights about what people discuss, and an interview study of twenty Reddit users to help us understand why certain kinds of conversation take place and others don't. We find that the discussion of gun politics falls into three groups: conservative pro-gun, liberal pro-gun, and liberal anti-gun. Each type of group has its own characteristic topics. While our subjects state that they would be willing to engage with others across the ideological divide, in practice they rarely do. Subjects are siloed into like-minded subreddits through a two-pronged effect, where they are simultaneously pushed away from opposing-view communities while actively seeking belonging in like-minded ones. Another contributing factor is Reddit's "karma" mechanism: fear of being downvoted and losing karma points and social approval of peers causes our subjects to hesitate to say anything in conflict with group norms. The pseudonymous nature of discussion on Reddit plays a complex role, with some subjects finding it freeing and others fearing reprisal from others not bound by face-to-face norms of politeness. Our subjects believe that content moderation can help ameliorate these issues; however, our findings suggest that moderators need different tools to do so effectively. We conclude by suggesting platform design changes that might increase discussion across difference.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding #vent Channels on Discord

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-09-27

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Vent channels on Discord, which are chat channels developed for people to express frustrations, can become an informal type of peer support system. This paper is a qualitative study of experiences with vent channels on Discord, examining the experiences of 13 participants through semi-structured interviews. We find that participants are able to meet their needs for social support via vent channels by receiving commiseration, advice, and validation from the responses of others. At the same time, vent channels can lead to frustration when participants have conflicting expectations for their interactions. We suggest ways that Discord or Discord server moderators can provide enhanced structure, clarity, and transparency in order to enable participants to have better experiences in vent channels.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Is Human-AI Interaction CSCW?

  2024-11-11 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  As AI systems progress in their capabilities, Human-AI Collaboration is likely to become an increasingly prevalent paradigm in many domains, including business, education, entertainment, and social activities. Historically, only computer-mediated collaborations involving at least two people have been considered part of the field of study known as CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work). This panel will engage CSCW 2024 attendees with the controversial and timely question of whether the purview of CSCW should be expanded to include research on "collaborations" involving a single person and one or more AI models or agents.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Community-Driven Models for Research on Social Platforms

  2024-11-11 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  This SIG will engage CSCW researchers in a collaborative discussion on the use of UGC from social platforms for academic research. In recent years, both the importance and difficulty of accessing such data for scientific inquiry have increased. Drawing on early experiences from Reddit's 'Reddit for Researchers' data-sharing initiative, this session will: (1) identify key directions in social computing research that such initiatives can support, (2) enumerate ethical and user safety concerns which must be addressed, and (3) ideate governance models to enable community-driven review of research data requests. Participants will inform the design of a more inclusive and effective research environment for the study of social platforms, better bridging the gap between industry and academia.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding Online Discussion Across Difference: Insights from Gun Discourse on Reddit

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2024-11-07 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? To investigate these questions, we need to explore them in a particular context. In this paper, we study discussions of gun policy on Reddit, with the overarching goal of developing insights into the potential of the internet to support understanding across difference. We use two methods: a clustering analysis of Reddit posts to contribute insights about what people discuss, and an interview study of twenty Reddit users to help us understand why certain kinds of conversation take place and others don't. We find that the discussion of gun politics falls into three groups: conservative pro-gun, liberal pro-gun, and liberal anti-gun. Each type of group has its own characteristic topics. While our subjects state that they would be willing to engage with others across the ideological divide, in practice they rarely do. Subjects are siloed into like-minded subreddits through a two-pronged effect, where they are simultaneously pushed away from opposing-view communities while actively seeking belonging in like-minded ones. Another contributing factor is Reddit's "karma" mechanism: fear of being downvoted and losing karma points and social approval of peers causes our subjects to hesitate to say anything in conflict with group norms. The pseudonymous nature of discussion on Reddit plays a complex role, with some subjects finding it freeing and others fearing reprisal from others not bound by face-to-face norms of politeness. Our subjects believe that content moderation can help ameliorate these issues; however, our findings suggest that moderators need different tools to do so effectively. We conclude by suggesting platform design changes that might increase discussion across difference.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mitigating Epistemic Injustice: The Online Construction of a Bisexual Culture

  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2024-02-16 · 13 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  People participating in online groups often co-construct knowledge of what they believe and, sometimes, co-construct their understanding of who they are . Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 13 members of the online forum r/bisexual on Reddit, we found participants collaboratively constructing an understanding of bisexuality. We found that this knowledge-building fills an epistemic gap resulting from bisexuality often being poorly understood. When individuals do not possess knowledge key to understanding their own lives, this can be seen as hermeneutical injustice —a type of epistemic injustice. We use the lens of hermeneutical injustice to shed light on participants’ experiences on r/bisexual. Our work contributes to recent research on epistemic injustice in HCI by looking at how members of r/bisexual mitigate epistemic injustice by reclaiming residuality—the space outside the gay-straight binary. We also discuss considerations for hermeneutical injustice to inform the design of online communities and HCI research practice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• ITR Collaborative Research: Indexing, Retrieval, and Use of Large Motion Databases

  NSF · $206k · 2004–2009

• HCC: Small: Copyright and Online Communities: An Empirical Study of Social Norms and User Conceptions

  NSF · $389k · 2012–2016

• RAPID: Social Media during Rapid Transition

  NSF · $181k · 2016–2017

• Pilot: Supporting and Transforming Leadership in Online Creative Collaboration

  NSF · $461k · 2009–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Casey Fiesler

  University of Colorado Boulder

  22 shared

• Andrea Forte

  Drexel University

  15 shared

• Kurt Luther

  Virginia Tech

  12 shared

• Sarita Yardi

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  11 shared

• José P. Zagal

  10 shared

• Shagun Jhaver

  10 shared

• Betsy DiSalvo

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  10 shared

• Éric Gilbert

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow of The ACM
• member of the SIGCHI Academy