In 2018, ADL Center for Technology and Society (CTS), with the support of the Robert Belfer Family, launched the Belfer Fellows program. Its third class of Belfer fellows includes three dynamic individuals studying hate and moral outrage, police responses to doxing, and UX design for user-created content moderation tools. The Belfer Fellowship program advances ADL’s work by promoting awareness of online hate and digital citizenship, as well as implementing these projects for the wider social good.
The three 2020 fellows are:
Dr. Molly Crockett
Dr. Molly Crockett, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Dr. Crockett is the Director and Founder of the Crockett Lab at Yale University which uses behavioral experiments, computational modeling, functional brain imaging, field studies and "big data" analyses to investigate the social mind. Her project will investigate whether and how social media platforms facilitate hate speech and harassment by amplifying moral outrage.
Naveed Jamali
Naveed Jamali, Newsweek editor at large and served as an FBI asset and worked for the U.S. Department of Defense as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve. He is also the author of “How to Catch a Russian Spy", and co-chairs the Swatting Mitigation Advisory Committee for the Seattle Police Department. Jamali’s project will explore the lack of procedures that law enforcement agencies use to deal with potentially lethal cyber hoaxes like swatting.
Dr. Amy Zhang
Dr. Amy Zhang, Assistant Professor at the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington. Her research is in the field of human-computer interaction and social computing. Zhang’s project is to build an interactive tool for people facing harassment that allows them to iteratively develop their own personal machine learning model that is customized to detect the harassment they wish to intercept, all without the need for programming skills.