PhD Student Position in Quantitative Online Discourse Research

The Public Policy Group and the Immigration Policy Lab at ETH Zurich invite applications for a PhD student position starting between July and September 2025. 

You will be part of a collaborative team committed to rigorous research on how to improve public discourse on social and online media and other digital platforms. We study the effects of platforms’ policies and work with them to design and test interventions to improve the quality of online discussions and reduce harm caused by hate speech. To do so, we combine data from social media, online newspapers and original surveys with causal inference and machine learning methods to bring new evidence to bear on the urgent problems policymakers and practitioners face. We collaborate with a nonprofit dedicated to tackling hate speech, the Public Discourse Foundation, and various newspapers to translate our research into impact.

We are looking for a PhD student to join our ongoing research program on online discourse and how to improve it. 

The research program aims to understand online discourse, with a particular focus on the DACH region, and design and implement interventions to improve discourse and reduce hate speech. We work together with online newspapers and use social media data. Our research employs advanced statistical methods for causal inference and we develop state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers for both harmful and high-quality speech. You will contribute your data science expertise to our ongoing projects, and have the opportunity to develop your own research projects in keeping with our wider research agenda. You will be able to work with exclusive datasets of online comments and collaborate with external partners on real-world problems and test the effectiveness of interventions in the field. 

The position is located in the team of Dominik Hangartner at ETH Zurich, but you will also have the opportunity to work with an array of affiliated faculty as well as with the Public Discourse Foundation. In addition to the research, you will have small administrative and teaching responsibilities amounting to 10% of your time.

Strong candidates will have most of the following:

• Undergraduate or (preferably) Master’s degree in a social science program with a preference for Political Science, Economics, Sociology, Data Science, Computational Social Science, or in a closely related discipline 
• Knowledge of causal inference methods and/or machine learning
• Strong command of R (required) and/or Python (desirable)
• Working knowledge of or interest in learning NLP methods (especially transformer models, but also LLM fine-tuning and similar applications)
• Experience or interest in designing, implementing, and analyzing field experiments and/or conducting quasi-experimental studies
• Ability to collaborate effectively with project team members and external stakeholders alike
• Proficiency and excellent writing skills in English; the ability to work in German and/or French is an asset
• Knowledge of or interest in social media platforms and content moderation policies 
• Experience of or interest in translating basic research to the benefit of society

• Highly collaborative work environment within a very motivated and supportive team
• Opportunity to develop a network with academics and practitioners
• Career mentoring by experienced researchers
• Generous salary and pension benefits according to ETH standards
• Research and travel allowance