Who am I?

• I’m a researcher interested in platform regulation, content moderation, and other transnational policy challenges posed by digital capitalism. I’m a postdoctoral research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and a fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).
• In fall 2021, I defended my dissertation, which I researched at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. The dissertation provides a comparative policy analysis of measures taken by governments to shape how platform companies moderate user-generated content, and is driven primarily by a combination of new archival material obtained via FOI requests and stakeholder interviews.
• While I was a PhD student, I held fellowships at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and the aforementioned CIGI. I also conducted research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the Oxford Internet Institute, the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill, and the Project on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford.

What do I do?

• My work brings perspectives drawn from political science and regulatory politics scholarship together with a range of interdisciplinary approaches to digital media research, with the aim of better understanding the politics behind various pressing tech policy issues. I’m interested in examining how major technology multinationals shape lives by setting rules and exerting influence, how other actors (governments, civil society, individuals) push back, and how this is (domestic and transnational) politics all the way down.

• Over the course of my PhD, I published a number of academic articles on the broad topic of platform regulation, including a literature review and conceptual map of the platform governance research landscape, a look at the intersection of automated decision-making and content moderation, and an exploration of the effects of ‘soft’ platform regulation through informal initiatives (like codes of conduct, or voluntary efforts).

• I’m broadly interested in the role of tech companies as increasingly important actors in global digital capitalism. I contribute to the Los Angeles Review of Books and have written about these topics for Wired Magazine UK, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and other outlets.

• Since 2020-2021, I’ve been working with colleagues in an effort to plant the seeds for a Platform Governance Research Network.