I’m an associate professor of Communication (and, by courtesy, Sociology) and HAI Senior Fellow at Stanford University. I study the social life of algorithms, platforms, and AI.

My forthcoming book, Gurus, Hucksters, Entertainers: How Influencers Reshaped Social Media (November 2026, University of Chicago Press) focuses on content creators on social media platforms. I show how platforms, brands, and audiences together nudge influencers toward the problematic mix of commercial, inflammatory, and extreme content that populates our social media feeds. I discussed it on several podcasts (Ethnography Atelier, Inner Cosmos, Think Fast Talk Smart, The Future of Everything).

I began chronicling the transformations of the public sphere with social media in my award-winning book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020). In it, I show how web journalists first entered the chase for clicks in the early 2010s, comparing how American and French journalists made sense of traffic numbers and how this shaped online news in the two countries.

I have a longstanding interest in technology and criminal justice. I analyzed the reception of predictive algorithms in U.S. criminal courts, building on previous work I conducted on criminal sentencing in French courts. I also study AI ethics, examining how the discourse of ethical, accountable, and safe AI emerged in Silicon Valley and beyond.

These days I’m spending a lot of time with astrophysicists and other scientists, asking questions about how they use AI for scientific discovery. I’m also studying the contemporary cultures of Silicon Valley.

At Stanford I organize the Technology, Culture, and Power Speaker Series and serve as an advisor for the Stanford Critical AI group. I am a co-editor of the Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology at Princeton University Press.

I am not accepting new MA students or Honors advisees at this point. Due to the volume of requests, I cannot schedule calls with prospective PhD students or host visiting students/scholars. I’m doing the best I can to answer emails, but many slip through the cracks.

In 2026-27, I will be on leave at the Sciences Po médialab and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.

If you wonder how to pronounce my first name (many people do), the Belgian singer Angèle does it really well here.