Simon Munzert

About me

I'm Professor of Data Science and Public Policy at the Hertie School in Berlin and Director of the Data Science Lab. My research focuses on political communication, attitude formation in the digital age, and the use of online data in social research. I use experimental methods, online data, and innovative measurement strategies to study how people act and think, politically. Please find my CV here.

+49 (0)30 259 219 450
munzert@hertie-school.org
@simonsaysnothin.bsky.social
github.com/simonmunzert
Google Scholar
ORCID

Current research

• The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change. (Working group 5: public and political engagement)
• Global Preferences for Online Hate Speech Regulation (joint project with Richard Traunmüller, funded by Facebook Research)
• Media Exposure and Opinion Formation in an Age of Information Overload (joint project with Pablo Barberá, Andrew Guess and JungHwan Yang, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation)
• Citizen and Elite Activity on the Wikipedia Market Place of Political Information (funded by the Daimler and Benz Foundation)

Foto: Hertie School | Maurice Weiß

See here for an overview of my current research and publications. Alternatively, browse my profile on Google Scholar.

Recent publications
David Hartmann et al. “Lost in Moderation: How Commercial Content Moderation APIs Over- and Under-Moderate Group-Targeted Hate Speech and Linguistic Variations.” CHI 2025, Yokohama, Japan.
Lukas F. Stoetzer et al. “An Election Forecasting Model for Subnational Elections.” Electoral Studies.
Simon Munzert et al. “Citizen preferences for online hate speech regulation.” PNAS Nexus.

I regularly teach graduate students about causal inference, online data collection, and computational social science in general. You can find syllabi here.

Automated Data Collection with R
Together with Christian Rubba, Peter Meißner and Dominic Nyhuis, I've written a book, Automated Data Collection with R - A Practical Guide to Web Scraping and Text Mining. The book has been published at John Wiley & Sons in 2015.