The work I'm most proud of
(Here is a list of just about all of my stories, going back years.)
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The Washington Post
We had AI analyze 50 hours of sports on TV. It detected gambling ads everywhere.
AI watched hours of TV so I didn’t have to – and we found which sports have far more gambling ads than others.
- The Washington Post
He spreads hate online — and fans pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars
I built an AI system to extract data on Nick Fuentes’s earnings from donors, shown on-screen, to understand his supporters.
- The Washington Post
TikTok’s mental health ‘rabbit hole’? It’s not in your head.
From 1,100 users’ donated data, we analyzed the behavior of TikTok’s algorithm and found it favors mental health content
- The Washington Post
Are you in TikTok’s cat niche? What 121,000 videos reveal.
I trained a simplified lookalike of TikTok’s algorithm on 1,100 users’ donated data, to model the “map” it uses to recommend content to users.
- The Washington Post
What are the clues that ChatGPT wrote something? We analyzed its style.
From thousands of scraped ChatGPT conversations, I delved into not just the LLM’s favorite phrases, but also how they changed over time.
- The Washington Post
We analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT conversations. Here’s what people really use it for.
I scraped 47,000 public ChatGPT conversations and classified them by topic.
- The Washington Post
Kennedy Center ticket sales have plummeted since Trump takeover
I monitored Kennedy Center ticket sales daily for dozens of shows to prove that audiences weren’t showing up.
- The Washington Post
How right-wing news powers the ‘gold IRA’ industry
I expose how right-wing news influencers earn lucrative fees for ads for “gold IRAs” that regulators, whistleblowers and customers allege are a massive fraud.
- The Washington Post
An ex-cop fell for Alice. Then he fell for her $66 million crypto scam.
I verified an ex-cop’s claim that he’d been scammed out of his savings by a crypto investment opportunity suggested by a woman he met online – it was true, and he wasn’t alone.
- The Washington Post
Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation
I tracked discussion, leaked from inside Facebook, of a single algorithm weight to show how the company ignored warnings about how it would make the site angrier – and then backtracked.
- The Markup
Facebook Charged Biden a Higher Price Than Trump for Campaign Ads
The result of an opaque pricing system is an apparent disparity between the candidates, I showed with extensive data analysis.
- ProPublica
“Trumpcare” Does Not Exist. Nevertheless Facebook and Google Cash In on Misleading Ads for “Garbage” Health Insurance.
Online ads advertise a non-existent product, sold with shady tactics that regulators don’t have the tools to stop.
- The Markup
Does Facebook still sell discriminatory ads?
Facebook banned discriminatory job ads. But it continued selling them.
- Quartz
AI for Investigations: Sorting through the Luanda Leaks
I devised a machine-learning system to help ICIJ journalists search a massive set of leaked documents.
- Quartz
Facebook ads targeted Fox News fans for shady silver coin scheme
We exposed a Beverly Hills boiler-room that used politically-inflammatory Facebook ads in an alleged scheme to defraud seniors of their savings. (Ten months later, the company was shut down by 30 states and the federal government.)
- ProPublica
How Big Oil Dodges Facebook’s New Ad Transparency Rules
With shady “coalitions,” trade groups from petroleum and other industries hide their identities to push their favored policies on Facebook – because Facebook doesn’t verify the existence of the groups it says pay for ads on the site.
- The New York Times
Why Facebook Showed You That Ad for the Candidate You Hate
I used a unique crowd-sourced database of Facebook ads to report on incongruous, jarring political ads targeted to our readers – and patterns in the campaigns’ tactics – during the 2016 election.
- The New York Times
How Donald Trump Talks
Does Donald Trump sound presidential? Quantitatively, he doesn’t.
- The New York Times
The Northeast Corridor's Curviest Stretches, and Amtrak's Plans for Safety and Speed
Part of the cause of the deadly Amtrak 188 crash in 2015 was curvy track on the Amtrak’s route. I made a map to show where these potentially-dangerous stretchs of track were.
- The Washington Post