Doctor Mike

Um, and then in 2019, uh, somebody I knew, uh, from, you know, actually from fighting with him on the internet, um, was starting the Stanford internet observatory.

And he asked if I'd be interested in coming to Stanford and, um, you know, doing these sorts of investigations as a, as you know, kind of an academic discipline.

And that was how I became an accidental academic.

Yeah, so summer of 2019, I started at Stanford, yeah.

Well, you know, you'd be surprised.

It actually didn't change that abruptly because we set up the center to, you know, to study adversarial abuse online, right?

And...

How would you define that exactly?

So if you see social media platforms and technologies as a playing field where there are many, many, many wonderful use cases connecting people, ordinary people using them in perfectly legitimate ways, there's always going to be some actors who are using them in explicitly manipulative and harmful ways.

So, for example, spammers, right?

Everybody knows that normal people send millions of emails.

Spammers also use email, right?

You can think about generative AI.

People use it for many legitimate purposes.

You also have people who use it to create fake persona accounts and be manipulative.

When you're creating social media accounts and talking to people on Twitter, you also have state actors pretending to be things that they're not.

Some of the work focuses on what we call trust and safety.

That's the sort of discipline or business line that technology platforms will also put it under.

So that's child safety.

So we look a lot at how are children sometimes targeted online, child exploitation content.