Postdoctoral Fellowship Project
Societal impacts and governance of emerging technologies: Technologies such as AI and social media increasingly shape private and public life, but their impact on society and how they can be governed effectively is poorly understood. Ruth’s research focuses on impact measurement and technology governance. She combines insights from political science, psychology and computer science to reduce the spread of misinformation, prevent election interference, promote wellbeing and mental health, and address ethical challenges related to technologies such as social media and generative AI.
Ruth Appel joins Stanford Impact Labs as a postdoctoral fellow from 2024-2025.
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PhD Fellowship Project
Department: Communication
Media and Politics Research Group
Misinformation and political polarization on social media: Although the majority of Americans seem to agree that freedom of expression is important to democracy and that social media companies should remove harmful content from the internet, they may disagree over what constitutes harmful online content based on their partisanship.
The research project “Censorship Perceptions and Partisanship” in collaboration with Jennifer Pan at Stanford and Margaret Roberts at UCSD investigates the extent to which partisanship obstructs shared understandings of “harmful content” and what constitutes “censorship.” The insights from this study could not only enhance our understanding of partisanship and the perception of censorship, but could also help inform content moderation policies that platforms and government agencies are considering and implementing.