- Coffee Hours host: https://www.tspa.org/trust-safety-coffee-hours/#alex-leavitt (2023 - 2024)- Trust & Safety Curriculum Working Group member: https://github.com/stanfordio/TeachingTrustSafety (2023 - 2024)- Trust & Safety in the Metaverse Working Group member (2023)

Lead social scientist conducting mixed-methods research & data science for Roblox's Trust & Safety org. Covering topics like content moderation, user behavior, pro-social design/interventions, child safety, parental controls, account security, and more.

Consulting on projects related to digital safety, AI-driven ranking, and societal impact measurement.

Senior-level social scientist in Social Media, People, & Society team at Meta (research team within centralized research & product Social Impact org). Previous to Social Impact, was one of the first researchers at Meta within the company's formal "Integrity" org.Led research, built teams, managed cross-functional collaborations, and organized executive strategy around key Trust & Safety topics of digital and offline harm, like misinformation, polarization, content quality, and crisis response.Worked on projects spanning:- information diversity, news exposure/engagement, & algorithmic ranking- misinformation, news trust, & authoritative information products- content quality, user preferences, & policy violating/borderline content label- ethnic/religious conflict, social conflict, offline violence, & human rights abuses- crisis response (e.g., Myanmar, Ethiopia, COVID-19, Ukraine, etc.)- disproportionate harms against historically-underserved & marginalized populations (e.g., LGBTQ+ community, Global South regions, etc.)- executive-level prioritization of Trust & Safety harms, content policies, social responsibility & social issues, etc.- various policies & corporate communication around hate speech, misinformation, COVID-19/vaccine content, & imminent offline harmWhile quantitative in title, methods are wide-ranging across mixed-methods approaches: - computational social science- surveys- survey experiments- content analysis- in-country ethnographic fieldwork- in-person/remote interviews & focus groupsConducted on-the-ground qualitative research in the United States, United Kingdom, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ukraine, & other regional analyses. Surveyed millions of participants in 100+ countries.Co-founded & managed senior-level researcher community (250+ members). Taught multiple research methods & strategy classes.Awarded Meta Research's top Achievement in Quantitative Research award (2017).

Research fellow and advisory committee member for industry-academia collaboration around online community platforms to provide access to and analysis for digital trace data.

For overview of research positions, publications, grants, and technical skills, see http://alexleavitt.com/cv/Working with the following research teams:• Virtual Worlds Observatory (http://vwobservatory.org/), a multi-university collaboration to study massively-multiplayer online games with empirical data analysis, social network analysis, and machine learning techniques (led by Profs. Dmitri Williams [USC] & Nosh Contractor [Northwestern]).• Annenberg Innovation Lab (http://datascience.annenberglab.com/), an industry-sponsored R&D lab for applied research. I help lead the Data Science research team with Prof. François Bar.• Computational Social Science Lab (http://dornsife.usc.edu/labs/cssl), a group led by Prof. Morteza Dehghani (Psychology/Brain Creativity Institute) studying the application of natural language processing and machine/deep learning in behavioral and perceptual research.• Annenberg Networks Network (http://ascnetworksnetwork.org/), a research group dedicated to network science and empirical data analysis (led by Prof. Peter Monge).• Civic Paths (http://civicpaths.uscannenberg.org/), a research team (led by Prof. Henry Jenkins) examining youth engagement with new media and civic participation.

Advanced statistical analysis, surveys, & interviews for News Feed & prototypes.

Statistical analyses for game design, social systems, balance, & monetization.Responsible for lead analytics and data visualization for six games. Collaborated with Analytics Manager to produce visualizations and other statistical insights for social design balance and monetization for five other games.

Predictive modeling & network analysis for retention/social features (mobile games).

Led cutting-edge, workshop-driven classes on understanding social data analysis and digital culture for leading marketing firms and design agencies.

Statistical & social network analyses for interest-based networks on Japanese Twitter.

Directed research team examining statistical and qualitative analysis of social media analytics projects.Led authoring of three white papers.

Conducted fieldwork and interviews to consult on DML Hub's use of communication technologies and online collaboration platforms.

Worked with leading social media researcher danah boyd in conducting ethnographic data collection and analysis of teenagers' cross-platform social media use.

Wrote transmedia-related write papers as a research consultant for Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices division.

Worked on various research projects looking at convergence of creative and technology industries. Authored white paper on impact of social media technologies on understanding television audiences:• Watching With the World: Television Audiences & Online Social Networks - http://www.convergenceculture.org/research/c3-watchingworld-full.pdf