Ruth E. Appel

I am an award-winning researcher combining deep technical expertise in AI and empirical social science to shape safe and responsible technology development and policy.

I am currently a Stanford Impact Labs Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and my 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 work has been published or is under review at top journals such as Science Advances or Nature Human Behaviour, has been featured in news outlets such as WIRED, and has been recognized with the Nathan McCoby outstanding dissertation award, multiple fellowships, and several impact grants.

Research

The first stream of my research addresses the governance and ethics of technology. My work contributes to our understanding of partisan disagreement about content moderation on social media by showing that this disagreement is not only due to disagreement about facts, but also due to a deeply rooted preference gap. In a follow up project, I am studying partisan preferences for content moderation in generative AI to inform AI alignment. My research has shown how to approximate political neutrality in AI and how to evaluate AI for political bias. My work has also contributed to a clearer conceptual understanding of psychological targeting and when it poses an ethical challenge. At Stanford’s Center for Research on Foundation Models, I am co-leading a project providing guidance for third-party AI evaluation.

The second stream of my research focuses on election interference and misinformation. I have led a research project that is part of an academic-industry collaboration with Meta (part of the Facebook and Instagram Election Study) and leverages log and survey data from millions of US Facebook users to advance our understanding of deceptive online networks by analyzing not only politically motivated networks, but also largely ignored financially motivated networks. My research also addresses the need for effective interventions to counter misinformation. I co-developed an effective and scalable online game that increases people’s resilience to vaccine misinformation, and am working on an evaluation of lab-tested misinformation interventions at scale on Facebook.

The third stream of my research focuses on interventions to promote wellbeing. I am a core contributor to a large panel study that advances psychological theory by introducing the concept of the empathy perception gap and contributes to public health by proposing a effective smartphone-based and educational interventions to improve social connection.

Policy impact

Beyond scientific impact, I strive for policy impact. I co-authored the report of the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, provided inputs to EU policy drafts, published popular press articles explaining key results, shared results with high-level government officials, and co-organized a transatlantic conference on geopolitics and tech with leaders from academia, industry and policy.

Background

I gained work experience as a Quantitative UX Research Intern at Google, as a Research Associate at Duke University, and as an Intern at the EU Delegation to the UN in New York.

I hold a PhD in Political Communication and a Master’s in Computer Science from Stanford University, a Master’s in Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris and a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Mannheim.