Radical Right-Wing Women on Facebook
At what rates and in what capacity do women participate in extreme far-right ("radical right") political online communities? (Read More)
Megan Squire
Computer Science PhD: data science, cybersecurity, online extremism
How are extremist groups organizing online? Who are the key players and what do they believe? Which groups are growing and which are shrinking? Why are some online communities more toxic than others?
I use my computer science skills to collect, store, and analyze massive amounts of data so we can understand how extremist and niche online communities work.
Latest Papers
Here are a few of my latest research papers and findings.
Anti-Muslim Hate Network on Facebook
How do anti-Muslim political groups use the Facebook social network to build their own online communities? Do they crossover with other far-right political ideologies, such as anti-immigrant or white nationalists? (Read More)
Analyzing the "Summer of Hate"
How "united" is the far-right? Which groups share members? Which ideologies tend to attract the same people? Which groups are responsible for uniting such distinct far-right ideologies at an event like the Charlottesville rally? (Read more)
Rudeness on Linux
How do the leaders of the Linux Kernel project write in email? What are the salient features of their writing, and can we discern one leader from another? (Read more)
Popular Press Writing
My "popular press" computer science writing has been published for media and think tanks:
How Big Tech and Policymakers Miss the Mark When Fighting Online Extremism
hy is it still so easy to find violent white supremacist content online, even though social media companies keep claiming that they are working overtime to delete it? (Read more at Brookings Institution)
Why the next terror manifesto will be even harder to track
It's difficult to track the spread of digital materials, and new technologies will make it even harder (Read more at Salon)
End-to-End encryption isn't enough security for "real people"
Everyday folks should work on improving security where we are most vulnerable—on our own devices (Read More at Scientific American)
Why we choose terrible passwords, and how to fix them
Humans are terrible at memorizing long, unpredictable sequences - how can we make the chore of choosing a password more palatable? (Read More at CBS News)
Why we should not know our own passwords
Can we create passwords even their owners don't know? (Read more at Time)
Media Coverage
I've discussed my work on right-wing extremist and toxic online communities with:Other Writing and Appearances
I also blog as a Senior Fellow for the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR) where my work has been reposted in Rantt and Sage Ocean.
I have appeared as a radio guest on several shows to discuss various cybersecurity issues, including BBC Radio's Up All Night, Radio New Zealand Nights, The Matt Townsend Show, The Vicki Davila Show (W Radio, Colombia), and The Academic Minute.
In addition to many research papers and articles for popular media, I have also written two books, Clean Data, and Mastering Data Mining with Python.