Welcome! I am an associate professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. I use quantitative and computational methods to study the relationship between digital media and politics.
Please see the Papers page for more information about my research, which explores questions such as:
I’m also a founding co-editor of the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, with Kevin Munger and Eszter Hargittai. You can read our essay introducing the journal’s philosophy and goals here.
We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of content classified as uncivil or containing slur words they saw decreased on Facebook, and the amount of content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences they saw increased on Facebook. Despite these substantial changes in users’ on-platform experience, the chronological feed did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes during the 3-month study period.