Dan Hickey

I am a first-year PhD Student in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. I am advised by David Bamman. My research interests are in computational social science and natural language processing, with an emphasis on studying online harms such as hate speech and misinformation. Currently, I am interested in understanding public discourse about scholarly work and how to mitigate the spread of misinformation about science.

During my undergraduate years, I researched online hate communities, studying topics such as how language diffuses among different types of hate communities or how effective counterspeech is at driving users away from hate communities. You can find a more detailed history of my previous experience in my CV.

Outside of work, I enjoy hiking, cooking, and writing reviews on traderjoesreviews.com.

Publications

The Peripatetic Hater: Predicting Movement Among Hate Subreddits

Daniel Hickey, Daniel MT Fessler, Kristina Lerman, and Keith Burghardt

To appear in the Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2025

HTML PDF

X Under Musk’s Leadership: Substantial Hate and No Reduction in Inauthentic Activity

Daniel Hickey, Daniel Fessler, Kristina Lerman, and Keith Burghardt

To appear in PLOS ONE, 2024

Bib

@article{hickey2024x,
  title = {X Under Musk's Leadership: Substantial Hate and No Reduction in Inauthentic Activity},
  author = {Hickey, Daniel and Fessler, Daniel and Lerman, Kristina and Burghardt, Keith},
  journal = {To appear in PLOS ONE},
  year = {2024},
}

Do users adopt extremist beliefs from exposure to hate subreddits?

Matheus Schmitz, Goran Muric, Daniel Hickey, and Keith Burghardt

Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2024

Bib HTML PDF

@article{schmitz2024users,
  title = {Do users adopt extremist beliefs from exposure to hate subreddits?},
  author = {Schmitz, Matheus and Muric, Goran and Hickey, Daniel and Burghardt, Keith},
  journal = {Social Network Analysis and Mining},
  volume = {14},
  number = {1},
  pages = {22},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {Springer},
}

Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots

Daniel Hickey, Matheus Schmitz, Daniel Fessler, Paul E Smaldino, Goran Muric, and Keith Burghardt

In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2023

Bib HTML PDF

@inproceedings{hickey2023auditing,
  title = {Auditing Elon Musk's Impact on Hate Speech and Bots},
  author = {Hickey, Daniel and Schmitz, Matheus and Fessler, Daniel and Smaldino, Paul E and Muric, Goran and Burghardt, Keith},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media},
  volume = {17},
  pages = {1133--1137},
  year = {2023},
}