Bruce Bimber studies how democracy is affected by computing and media environments. His interests in this topic extend back to the 1980s, when he earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. He worked in Silicon Valley in the days when personal computers were first diffusing widely and well before the commercial Internet. Much of his research since then has focused on how Internet use shapes collective action and political knowledge. He has written extensively about how the Internet facilitates the formation of political groups both within the mainstream and at the extremes. In recent years, he has turned to the study of democratic erosion, focusing on the role of social media use in people's belief in conspiracy theories and in the spread of populist and illiberal attitudes, which are intertwined with falsehoods of various kinds. He is currently working on the use of AI to analyze conspiracy theories and endorsements of political violence in social media content. His doctorate in political science is from MIT. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Communication Association, and a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.