I’m the 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.

My work is animated by the belief that (on the one hand) public policy & private innovation should engage with rigorous evidence to support ethical technology and that (on the other) research should engage with the pressing questions being asked by policymakers & innovators. More specifically, I spend time across three areas:

  1. I do research. I use experimental and computational methods to study the diffusion of online information, the impact this information has on the public, and what interventions might make the digital information environment healthier. My research has been published in / accepted by Nature, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and the Journal of Online Trust & Safety, among other outlets.

  2. I engage the diverse and growing ecosystem of stakeholders working on tech policy issues. I try to translate academic research for these audiences to inform their decision-making, which has led to regular speaking engagements in academic, industry, and government contexts. I've also written for and been quoted in leading popular outlets.

  3. I work to build sustainable and effective organizations. I've helped launch & run what is now a 20-person, multi-million dollar research center, leading the ground-up development of our operations, fundraising, finance, and HR functions. We’ve raised 8-figures to date, with grants from leading private and public funders. This work of building organizational capacity relied on my experiences, before coming to academia, in operations roles across both start-ups and non-profits.

Outside of NYU, I consult for an international NGO working on information integrity and am on the Siegel Family Endowment Research Advisory Board.

Below, I provide a snapshot of my public-facing work. However, some of my proudest achievements are what happens behind the scenes; e.g., developing direct reports, raising funds to support our research, and building networks across disparate groups.

Publications

Academic Research*

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

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

  • 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

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

  • Digital town square? Nextdoor's offline contexts and online discourse — invited submission by special issue of Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media

*note: we do team science at CSMaP, so all of this work has been co-authored with brilliant colleagues

Public Commentary & Analysis

  • 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)

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

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

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

Tech

  • Meta Oversight Board Roundtable

  • Facebook - Community Review Research Project

Government & Policy

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

  • USAID - Evidence and Learning Talk Series

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

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

  • PCIO Measuring Interventions Workshop

  • Dirksen Senate Building - Disinformation and the 2020 Election

Selected Media