Petter Törnberg
Research on digital platforms, AI, and collective life
Petter Törnberg researches how digital platforms and AI reshape public discourse, political conflict, urban life, and democratic institutions.
His work brings computational social science into conversation with social theory. He is interested in how technologies become part of collective life: how they influence what people see, how groups form, how political conflict travels, and what new forms of power emerge.
This site brings together his research, writing, projects, and conversations in the media.
Questions I Work On
- Digital politics, misinformation, and polarization
- Social media governance and platform power
- Large language models for social science research
- Urban and platform transformations in digital capitalism
Featured Books
Two books on platform power, far-right extremism, and digital governance.
Working Across Disciplines
These questions often require more than one kind of evidence. The work combines computational analysis, social simulation, close reading, and conceptual thinking, usually in collaboration with researchers from different fields.
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Publications
Selected papers, books, and research questions.
Projects
Current and past research programs and collaborations.
Media
Interviews, commentary, and conversations beyond academia.
Press Kit
Downloadable photos and media-ready resources.
CV
Appointments, projects, publications, and academic activities.
selected publications
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Validation is the Central Challenge for Generative Social Simulation: A Critical Review of LLMs in Agent-Based ModelingArtificial Intelligence Review. Contribution: a methodological case for validating generative social simulations. , 2025Published version; preprint available on arXiv