Recent years have witnessed a global declining trust in major institutions, including governments, media, and each other. Many believe that the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and polarized narratives in cyberspace had a great impact on the deteriorated public trust and the decline of democracy. In particular, social media extends the capabilities of sophisticated targeting of information campaigns and diffusion of manipulated views. To better understand the cyber-social phenomena, I will present a series of measurement studies that characterize social media users' participation in the mediated public sphere and the role social media plays in social movement and civic conversations. These studies reveal the structural advantages of information campaigns, the connections between online engagement and offline group conflicts, and how the online and offline inequalities intertwine. This line of research helps reveal new opportunities to examine and ensure the progress of social media toward its normative potential. 

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