Hello! Thanks for your interest in my research; or if you stumbled here, welcome.

I’m a social scientist now working at Google at the intersection of emerging products and emerging regulations, with a focus on the societal impacts of AI. Generally, I’m interested in questions that contribute to an academic literature, engage public policy debates, and are relevant to products. Methodologically, I tend to use experimental and computational methods, but have fun reading theory and qualitative work (send me recs!).

Before Google, I was the founding Executive Director of the NYU Center for Social Media & Politics, a computational research institute studying the ever-evolving relationship between the digital information environment and society. I was also a Research Associate at the Center on Technology Policy and a Tech & Public Policy Fellow at Georgetown McCourt School. My academic research has been published in leading general science and disciplinary journals, and my writing and analysis has been published / quoted in popular outlets. Outside of work, I’ve consulted for an international NGO working on information integrity and served on various boards / advisory bodies (e.g., Princeton Accelerator’s Data Safety Monitoring Board, the Research Advisory Council of the Siegel Family Endowment, and the advisory board of the start-up NewsGuard).

Below, I provide a snapshot of my work. The goal for this list is not to be comprehensive (it’s far from that), but instead aims to highlight work that I’m proud of and reflects the type of questions I enjoy thinking about.

If you’re interested in discussing research, how to navigate the academia / think tank / industry ecosystem, or anything else, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or email: zeve.sanderson [at] nyu [dot] edu.

When I’m not working or consulting, I play a lot of basketball (was a good high school & bad Division I player), read a lot of fiction (which I sometimes write), and hang out with my dog.

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 (R&R)

    • Coverage in Mashable

  • It Works When It Works: Measuring the Direct and Indirect Effects of AI Labels on Political Images — working paper on OSF (under review)

  • 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 — published in Big Data & Society

*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

  • We failed the fight against misinformation. Now what? — published in Noema

  • A dangerous plan to ‘win’ the AI race is circulating — published op-ed in The Washington Post

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

  • When Age Assurance Laws Meet Chatbots — published on 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