I'm Ruth, a Stanford Impact Labs Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University combining technical expertise in AI and empirical social science to shape safe and responsible technology development and policy. My award-winning research focuses on the societal impact of AI and social media and on developing evidence-based approaches to technology governance.
I integrate insights from computer science and political science, psychology, and economics, and I use computational and experimental methods to analyze large-scale datasets. I am particularly passionate about addressing governance and ethics challenges, preventing misinformation and election interference, and promoting wellbeing.
🔍 My current research includes
- Measuring generative AI content moderation preferences to inform AI alignment
- Developing guidance for third-party AI evaluation based on a workshop on AI evaluation
- Measuring the reach of influence campaigns on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 US elections (part of the Facebook and Instagram Election Study, under review at Nature Human Behaviour)
- Developing and evaluating an online game to counter vaccine misinformation (under review at Scientific Reports)
- Evaluating misinformation interventions on Facebook at scale and in non-Western contexts
- Developing and evaluating smartphone-based and educational interventions to improve youth wellbeing (under review at Nature Human Behaviour)
- Evaluating generative AI for political bias
📚 My published research addresses
- How social media regulation can inform generative AI regulation (NeurIPS Regulatable ML Workshop)
- How partisanship affects content moderation preferences (Sciences Advances, ⭐ top 5% of all research output scored by Altmetric)
- The ethics and privacy implications of new technologies
- Privacy in the age of psychological targeting (Current Opinion in Psychology)
- Privacy and ethics in the age of Big Data (In The psychology of technology: Social science research in the age of Big Data, APA)
- Psychological targeting in the age of Big Data (In Measuring and Modeling Persons and Situations, Elsevier)
🔗 Learn more about me on https://ruthappel.github.io/. My website includes
- full list of academic work
- full list of policy work
- responsible tech resources