Dan Hickey

I am a second-year PhD Student in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. I am advised by David Bamman. I use computational methods to study disagreement and conflict in online spaces. My past work focused on 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. More recently, I have been investigating beliefs and consensus form around scientific questions in online communities, and how different communities vary in terms of what they treat as acceptable evidence to back up scientific claims.

Outside of work, I enjoy hiking, cooking, salsa dancing, picking up trash, making action figures out of office supplies, and writing reviews on traderjoesreviews.com.

Publications

Assessing How Hate, Counterspeech, and Toxicity Affect Hate Group Newcomers

Daniel Hickey, Daniel MT Fessler, Matheus Schmitz, Paul E Smaldino, Kristina Lerman, Goran Murić, and Keith Burghardt

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2026

HTML PDF
The peripatetic hater: predicting movement among hate subreddits

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

In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2025

HTML PDF
When AI Tells Their Story: Researchers’ Reactions to AI-Generated Podcasts as a Tool for Communicating Research

Daniel Hickey, Quan Connie Gu, and Kimiko Ryokai

In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025

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

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

PLOS ONE, 2025

Bib HTML PDF

@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 = {PLOS ONE},
  year = {2025},
}

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},
}