Bad actors have no shortage of tools for manipulation, propaganda, and algorithmic influence. Far fewer people know how to wield that same power ethically for the benefit of others. Omar Shehata is one of them.

He studies how ideas travel, transform, and take root online, mapping how digital scenes emerge and what makes collaboration possible.

Understanding the mechanics of how ideas spread can help more people coordinate consciously and constructively, at scale. His work pulls together threads from network science, digital sociology, and information theory to better understand how groups think together.

Since receiving the grant, Omar has been hard at work. He now runs Prosocial Engineering, an open source intelligence agency that does everything a conventional intelligence shop does—monitoring, infiltrating, influencing—but with a key difference: its targets are informed about operations before they begin. Among his notable projects are the Twitter Community Archive, a first-of-its-kind open culture research weather station; Anatomy of an Internet Argument, an open source psyop to make internet debates between strangers productive; and Good & Evil Words, a prototype demonstrating large-scale monitoring and social engineering of collective understanding.