Current Research Interests & Projects
Propaganda & Disinformation
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Disinformation & Foreign Influence Operations
I have conducted significant research on the spread of disinformation in country-specific contexts, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. At Stanford, I worked with platform integrity teams to investigate takedowns. At Oxford University, I also led the Computational Propaganda Project’s flagship research report, the Global Cyber Troops Inventory, which is the largest global incident database of disinformation campaigns run by state actors. Under this research stream, I am also working on a project that explores the scale and scope of climate change disinformation on Facebook. My public work and writing on propaganda and foreign influence operations is often policy oriented, and focused on empowering civil society to combat influence operations online, through the development of best-practices, skills training, and knowledge diffusion.
Critical Disinformation Studies and Identity-Based Propaganda
Another central theme of my research explores how identity shapes propaganda and disinformation online. Some of my recent and forthcoming work includes studies that look at the gender dimensions of foreign influence operations, race and racism in state-backed media coverage of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, or accessibility, justice, and misinformation labels. By foregrounding the study of disinformation broadly within culture, my research on propaganda and disinformation also takes a critical and holistic view of the contemporary challenges facing democracy.
Platform Governance
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Platform Governance and Civic Life
Platforms have become some of the most important institutions for contemporary political communication. Through their terms of service agreements, community guidelines, or even the daily decisions they make through both human and automated systems to filter, promote, or delete content or accounts, platforms are determining answers to some of the most difficult questions facing contemporary democracies. Despite this, we know very little about when platforms enforce their rules or the actual impact these decisions have on citizens. One of my recent project explore how labelling policies affect user perceptions of state-backed media on YouTube. In another project, I audit and evaluate when platforms enforced their policies against over 4,700 pieces of election-related misinformation reported to them during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. This stream of work helps illuminate the hidden power of platforms as authorities over the global information flow, while also informing contemporary policy debates on the impact of platforms’ measures for combatting disinformation.
Internet Governance, Cyber Security, & The Politics of Cyberspace
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Internet Governance & the Politics of Design
Beneath the layer of content are technical and institutional arrangements of infrastructure, hardware, and software that govern the Internet. Some of my work has explored the politicization of the Internet’s Domain Name System, or the privacy issues embedded into this system. I have also looked at the design of social media platforms, exploring how the design of algorithms can accelerate the spread of mis-and-disinformation online. Although this infrastructure is less visible, the design, governance, and use of these infrastructures embed a wide-range of public policy issues, which my research explores.
Cybersecurity & the Geopolitics of Cyberspace
In addition to my work on Internet governance, I also write about the geopolitics of cyberspace. Here, some of my early research explored the emergence of contention in global Internet governance, the technical, legal, and political aspects of attribution, or how Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTS) foster international norms for cyber security best practices. More recently, my projects have looked at the politics of 5G and how geopolitical rivalries between the US and China have played out in the development and implementation of 5G standards. Under this research umbrella, I am also working on a research project that looks at the securitization of “fake news” laws around the world, as well as a chapter that explores disinformation as a cybersecurity issue in technical architecture of the Internet and the Internet of Things.