Here, I tell you why I do what I do. Below, I provide a snapshot of my public-facing work.

Publications

Academic Research*

  • Online Searches to Evaluate Misinformation Can Increase Its Perceived Veracity — published in Nature

    • Coverage in Scientific American, Jerusalem Post, Vice, Forbes

  • Measuring receptivity to misinformation at scale on a social media platform — published in PNAS Nexus

  • Do Age-Verification Bills Change Search Behavior?A Pre-Registered Synthetic Control Multiverse — working paper on OSF

    • Coverage in Mashable

  • Twitter flagged Donald Trump’s tweets with election misinformation: They continued to spread both on and off the platform. — published in Harvard Misinformation Review

    • Coverage in USA Today, Popular Science, and CNET

  • Moderating with the Mob: Evaluating the Efficacy of Real Time Crowdsourced Fact Checking — published in Journal of Online Trust & Safety

    • Coverage in The Washington Post and The Platformer

  • A Multi-Stakeholder Approach for Leveraging Data Portability to Support Research on the Digital Information Environment — published in Journal of Online Trust & Safety

  • Beyond Competition: Designing Data Portability to Support Research on the Digital Information Environment — invited policy paper (published on SSRN) for the 2024 Data Transfer Summit

    • Coverage in Tech Policy Press

  • Testing The Effect of Information on Discerning the Veracity of News in Real-Time — published in Journal of Experimental Political Science

  • Digital town square? Nextdoor's offline contexts and online discourse — published in special issue of between the International AAAI Conference on the Web and Social Media (ICWSM) and the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media (JQD:DM)

  • Web scraping for research: Legal, ethical, institutional, and scientific considerations — working paper on arxiv

*note: we do team science at CSMaP, so all of this work (other than “Beyond Competition”) has been co-authored with brilliant colleagues

Public Commentary & Analysis

  • 2024 State of State Tech Policy — white paper (covered in Brooking, Pluribus, Tech Policy Press)

  • When it comes to understanding AI’s impact on elections, we’re still working in the dark — published in Brookings

  • Mosaics of Insight: Auditing TikTok Through Independent Data Access — published in Lawfare

  • Misunderstood mechanics: How AI, TikTok, and the liar’s dividend might affect the 2024 elections — published in Brookings

  • Musk’s Twitter shake-up could deliver a critical blow to social media research — published in The Hill

  • Big Tech must step up now to fight misinformation in the midterms — published in The Hill

  • Twitter Was Central to American Politics. Musk’s Ownership Puts That at Risk — published in Barron’s

  • Gender-based online violence spikes after prominent media attacks — published in Brookings

  • How to Evaluate Elon Musk’s (Potential) Impact On Twitter — published in Tech Policy Press

  • A Modest Ox: Examining Two Approaches to Testing Crowdsourced Fact Checking — published in Tech Policy Press

  • Academic Researchers Need Access to the Facebook Papers — published in Slate

  • Do Twitter warning labels work? — published in The Washington Post

  • It's not easy for ordinary citizens to identify “fake news” — published in The Washington Post

  • How Trump impacts harmful Twitter speech: A case study in three tweets — published in Brookings

Selected Invited Talks

Academia

  • Trust & Safety Research Conference (Stanford University)

  • Frontiers of Prevention: Generative AI, Online Misinformation and Disinformation, and Elevated Risks of Political Violence in Key 2024 Elections (Binghamton University)

  • Immigration Policy Lab - Mapping Political Trends through Twitter (Stanford University)

  • Misinformation in Times of Conflict (Carnegie Mellon)

  • Global Tech Policy at a Turning Point (Brown University)

  • The Shaping of Our Political Landscape: Technology, Disinformation & Polarization (Carnegie Mellon)

  • Political Economy Speaker Series (NYU Stern)

Tech & Industry

  • Keynote at MoffettNathanson annual conference — Future of Search

  • Meta Oversight Board Roundtable

  • OpenAI Elections Workshop

  • Google (multiple times)

  • Facebook (multiple times)

Government & Policy

  • U.S. State Department — PD Forum: The Intersection of Social Media & Democracy

  • Rep. Lori Trahan — Roundtable on Researcher Access to Data Held by Social Media Platforms

  • USAID — Evidence and Learning Talk Series

  • United Nations Commission on Social Development — Youth-Driven Tech for Social Good: Young Entrepreneurs and Activists using Technology to Address Social Issues in Education

  • R Street — Misinformation and Disinformation: Is Democracy in Crisis, and Is It at Risk of Failing?

  • Disinformation Defense League - From Problems to Solutions: Shifting the Disinfo Framework

  • U.S. State Department — Countering Holocaust Distortion and Denial

  • PCIO Carnegie Endowment — Measuring Interventions Workshop

  • Dirksen Senate Building — Disinformation and the 2020 Election

Selected Media