#SMSociety awards are selected by the Organizing Committee from accepted papers, using peer-review scores and reviewer feedback as the basis for their decisions.
Best Paper Award
The Best Paper Award recognizes an outstanding conference paper that makes a strong theoretical or empirical contribution to research on social media and society. The award highlights work presented at the International Conference on Social Media & Society (#SMSociety) that demonstrates originality, clarity, and scholarly impact.
Best Method Poster Award
The Best Method Paper Award honours a paper that advances research practice through innovative, rigorous, or well-executed methodological approaches. It celebrates work that offers clear value for researchers studying social media and society.
Best Poster Award
The Best Poster Award recognizes a visually compelling and intellectually strong poster that clearly communicates research questions, methods, and findings. The award highlights effective engagement, clarity, and creativity in poster-based scholarship.
Inaugural Anatoliy Gruzd & Philip Mai
#SMSociety Founders’ Emerging Scholar Award
The Anatoliy Gruzd & Philip Mai #SMSociety Founders’ Emerging Scholar Award recognizes an exceptional student researcher whose paper demonstrates originality, rigour, and real promise to shape the study of social media and society. Named in honour of Anatoliy Gruzd and Philip Mai, co-founders of the International Conference on Social Media & Society (#SMSociety), the award reflects their desire to support the next generation of researchers and their vision of building a vibrant, interdisciplinary global research community. The recipient stands out for creative thinking, strong scholarship, and the clear potential to influence future research in the field. The award is generously sponsored by Communalytic.org, a no-code computational social science research tool designed to help scholars study online communities and public discourse across social media platforms.