person

Ruth Appel

Ruth Appel is a PhD Candidate at Stanford University who combines insights and methods from psychology, political science and computer science to develop and evaluate evidence-based interventions to promote the social good.

She is particularly passionate about preventing the spread of misinformation, promoting wellbeing and mental health, and addressing ethical challenges related to new technologies.

Her current research includes a project measuring the reach of influence campaigns on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 US elections, designing and evaluating an online game to combat vaccine misinformation, and a large-scale evaluation of misinformation interventions on Facebook. She has written about how partisanship affects content moderation preferences and about the ethics and privacy implications of new technologies.

She gained work experience as a UX Research Intern at Google, as a Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, and as an Intern at the EU Delegation to the UN in New York. She hold a Master’s in Public Policy from Science Po Paris and a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Mannheim.As Vice President of the Stanford German Student Association, she is involved in building transatlantic bridges and co-organized the Transatlantic Summit 2022, an international conference on geopolitics and tech.