With Madeleine Daepp, Robert Osazuwa Ness, Vickie Wang, Bharat Nayak, Dibyendu Mishra, Ti-Chung Cheng, Shaily Desai, and Joyojeet Pal
(Under Submission)
We characterize the use of Gen AI to manipulate public opinion through fieldwork in two countries characterized by their abundance of computational propaganda.
With Manoel Horta Ribeiro
(Under Submission)
We investigate the causal impact of the TAKE IT DOWN Act and the subsequent MrDeepfakes shutdown on the production and demand of synthetic non-consensual explicit imagery.
With Pranav Gadde and Manoel Horta Ribeiro
(Under Submission)
We investigate the causal impact of YouTube’s July 15th inauthentic content policy update on the supply, demand, and pricing of YouTube channels in two secondary markets: Fameswap and Accs-Market.
With Manoel Horta Ribeiro and Nicolas Christin
(To Appear at USENIX Security 2026)
We measure sales of social media accounts and investigate their uses after they are sold. We find that many accounts are used for potentially illicit ends, such as political propaganda or financial scams. We then develop a technique to identify similar accounts in the wild.
With Taro Tsuchiya, Tina Marjanov, Haoxiang Yu, Alice Hutchings, and Nicolas Christin
(Under Submission)
We collect a large dataset of Telegram bots using snowball sampling as well as other public sources. We then interact with the bots to obtain additional information about their uses. Our goal is to characterize the uses of Telegram bots, ranging from the benign to the malicious.
With Nicolas Christin
We document and characterize the emerging and evolving use cases of Generative AI models by exploring how people in underground communities use, monetize, and distribute Gen AI tools and models.