My name is Alex Leavitt (they/them), and I'm a social scientist and internet researcher . Most recently, I spent 7 years at Meta Research , leading research for product, policy, and strategy work related to social media's impact on society generally and marginalized populations specifically, across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and comparative platform analysis. Most of my projects touched on misinformation , polarization , news & information needs , crisis response (COVID-19/vaccines, Ukraine, LGBTQ+ comm
I currently reside in San Francisco, after having lived in Los Angeles, Kyoto, and Boston.
I frequently work across industry and academia, publishing my research in venues like ACM CSCW and ACM SIGCHI . Spanning my research career, I have been part of a number of data science and user experience research teams with a handful of major social media platform and interactive media companies, like Meta, Sony PlayStation, Disney Interactive, and SocialFlow.