Research Areas & Projects

Content Moderation

Exploring the global political impact of content decisions.

Platform Governance

How do platforms govern, and how should they be governed?

Cybersecurity

How do private actors shape the global cybersecurity conversation?

Bots

What is the political economy of online automation?

Journal Articles

This article seeks to provide a first mapping of the interdisciplinary research agenda for platform governance, overview emerging governance modes, and discuss some of the normative principles which promise to shape platform governance going forward.
Information, Communication & Society, 2019.
Preprint Project Online First

In this article, we provide a history and typology of different types of bots, provide clear guidelines to better categorize political automation and unpack the impact that it can have on contemporary technology policy, and outline the main challenges and ambiguities that will face both researchers and legislators concerned with bots in the future.
Policy & Internet, 2018.
Project Online First arXiv

Other Publications

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(2019). Glasnost? Nine ways Facebook can make itself a better forum for free speech and democracy. Oxford, UK: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Project Report

(2019). Prayer-Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider Research Agenda. Minds & Machines.

Project Open Access

(2018). Tech Companies as Cybersecurity Norm Entrepreneurs: A Critical Analysis of Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Tech Accord. Hague Conference on Responsible Behaviour in Cyberspace, (The Hague, November 5-7).

Project SocArXiv

(2018). Unpacking the Ecosystem of Social Media Manipulation: A Polish Case Study. Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media, edited by Samuel Woolley and Philip Howard. Oxford University Press.

Project OUP Google Books

(2018). Studying Politically Vulnerable Communities Online: Ethical Dilemmas, Questions, and Solutions. ICWSM Workshop on Exploring Ethical Trade-offs in Social Media Research (Stanford, June 25).

arXiv

(2018). What Should We Do About Political Automation? Challenges for Policy and Research. International Communication Association (Prague, May 24-28).

Project arXiv

(2018). Current Challenges for Bot Policy and Foreign Interference. Washington, DC: Campaign Legal Centre.

Project Report

(2017). Computational Propaganda in Poland: False Amplifiers and the Digital Public Sphere. Oxford, UK: Oxford Internet Institute.

Project Report

Writing

Long: Essays & Journalism

  • “The Last of the Unicorns: Facebook and the Fight for a Better Future.” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2019.
  • “Facebook’s Decency Conundrum.” Wired Magazine (UK), November/December 2018.
  • “Platform Moderation and Its Discontents.” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2018.
  • “Tinder Nightmares: The Promise and Peril of Political Bots.” Wired (UK), July 2017 (with Doug Guilbeault).
  • “Quantum Leap: China’s Satellite and the New Arms Race.” Foreign Affairs, September 2016 (with Taylor Owen).

Short: Op-eds & Blogs

  • Outlining self-governance policy suggestions for Facebook, and summarizing some insights from our RISJ report on content moderation and speech. Wired (UK), March 2019 (with Danaë Metaxa). Reblogged at OxPol.
  • Thinking about solutions for Twitter’s (largely self-imposed) bot problem. Quartz, October 2017.
  • On Facebook, foreign interference, and sharing data with researchers. Washington Post, May 2017 (with Phil Howard).
  • Why detecting ‘Russian bots’ isn’t as easy as people seem to think. NetPolitics, March 2017.
  • Reflecting on global privacy and security coordination problems after the Dyn DDOS attack. OpenCanada, November 2016.
  • A conversation about quantum computing, R&D, and state power. World Politics Review, October 2016 (with Taylor Owen).
  • Talking to a colleague about the ethics of doing research in conflict zones. The Envoy, October 2015.