J Bright
Biographic Data
| ID | 50081 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Bright |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Bright |
| SIGNATURE | BRIGHT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1248-9275 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 181 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Gendered inequalities in online harms
Online harms, such as hate speech, trolling and self-harm promotion, continue to be widespread. There are growing concerns that these harms may disproportionately affect women, reflecting and reproducing existing structural inequalities within digital spaces. Using a nationally representative survey of UK adults (N = 1992), we examine how gender shapes exposure to a variety of online harms, fears surrounding being targeted, the psychological impa…
Understanding Engagement With Platform Safety Technology for Reducing Exposure to Online Harms
User-facing ‘platform safety technology’ encompasses an array of tools offered by social media platforms to help people protect themselves from harm, for example allowing people to report content or block other users. These tools are an increasingly important part of online safety; however, little is known about how users engage with them. We present findings from a nationally representative survey of UK adults examining their experiences with on…
Unite the study of AI in government
Cheap Learning
The field of machine learning has recently made significant progress in reducing the requirements for labeled training data when building new models. These 'cheaper' learning techniques hold significant potential for the social sciences, where development of large labeled training datasets is often a significant practical impediment. In this article we review three 'cheap' techniques that have developed in recent years: Weak supervision, transfer…
How to Build Progressive Public Services with Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
The new government faces an urgent challenge: revitalising the UK's crumbling public services without major increases in public spending. While technological change holds promise, UK digital government initiatives have failed to reach their full potential over the past twenty‐five years. This article argues that the latest generation of ‘data‐intensive’ technologies, including data science and AI, can succeed where past efforts have faltered. We …
The political economy of digital profiteering
Contemporary communication requires both a supply of content and a digital information infrastructure. Modern campaigns of misinformation are especially dependent on that back-end infrastructure for tracking and targeting a sympathetic audience and generating revenue that can sustain the campaign financially—if not enable profiteering. However, little is known about the political economy of misinformation, particularly those campaigns spreading m…
Artificial intelligence in government
How Do Climate Change Skeptics Engage with Opposing Views Online? Evidence from a Major Climate Change Skeptic Forum on Reddit
Does exposure to opposing views contribute to breaking down science skepticism? In this study, we contribute to the debate by examining reactions to opposing views within a major climate change skeptic online community on “Reddit.” A large sample of posts (N = 3000) was manually coded according to whether they were opposed to climate skepticism or not, which allowed the automated classification of the full dataset of more than 50,000 posts, with …
Misinformation and professional news on largely unmoderated platforms
To date, there is little research to measure the scale of misinformation and understand how it spreads on largely unmoderated platforms. Our analysis of 200,000 Telegram posts demonstrates that links to known sources of misleading information are shared more often than links to professional news content, but the former stays confined to relatively few channels. We conclude that, contrary to popular received wisdom, the audience for misinformation…
New forms of cultural nationalism? American and British Indians in the Trump and Brexit Twittersphere
Diaspora networks are one of the key, but often invisible, drivers in reinforcing long‐distance nationalism towards the ‘homeland’ but simultaneously construct nationalist myths within their countries of residence. This article examines Indian diaspora supporters of Brexit and Trump in the United Kingdom and the United States who promote exclusionary nationalist imaginaries. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, it analyses British I…
Origines et impacts des hyper-utilisateurs et hyper-utilisatrices en cyberdémocratie. Le cas du pétitionnement en ligne
La répartition fortement inégale des niveaux d’engagement entre personnes utilisant les sites web de participation citoyenne (e-forums, sites de pétitionnement en ligne, etc.) est l’une des caractéristiques les plus connues de ces plateformes : alors que la majorité de leurs membres n’y participe que très peu, une petite minorité, souvent qualifiée d’« hyper-utilisatrice » ( power users ), y contribue abondamment. Cette minorité est sous-étudiée …
The Internet and public policy
In January 2021, the editorial team of Policy & Internet changed from the Oxford Internet Institute to the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. This article invites all the past and current editors to contribute to the future directions and discussion of internet and public policy. It is collection of six contributions covering the trajectory of the internet policy research agenda, platform power in the digital econ…
How Do Individuals in a Radical Echo Chamber React to Opposing Views? Evidence from a Content Analysis of Stormfront
Calls to “break up” radical echo chambers by injecting them with alternative viewpoints are common. Yet, thus far there is little evidence about the impact of such counter-messaging. To what extent and how do individuals who inhabit a radical echo chamber engage with messages that challenge their core beliefs? Drawing on data from the radical right forum Stormfront we address this question with a large-scale content and longitudinal analysis of u…
SciPy 1.0
SciPy is an open-source scientific computing library for the Python programming language. Since its initial release in 2001, SciPy has become a de facto standard for leveraging scientific algorithms in Python, with over 600 unique code contributors, thousands of dependent packages, over 100,000 dependent repositories and millions of downloads per year. In this work, we provide an overview of the capabilities and development practices of SciPy 1.0…
Countering Extremists on Social Media
Extremist exploitation of social media platforms is an important regulatory question for civil society, government, and the private sector. Extremists exploit social media for a range of reasons—from spreading hateful narratives and propaganda to financing, recruitment, and sharing operational information. Policy responses to this question fit under two headings, strategic communication and content moderation. At the center of both of these polic…
Power users in online democracy
One well-known characteristic of participatory websites is that the distribution of contribution levels is highly skewed: most people who make use of the service contribute only a little, but a small minority, often known as ‘power users’, contribute a lot. These power users are understudied in the literature on online democratic participation: this article aims to fill this gap. Based on a unique observational dataset of hundreds of thousands of…
Smart Technology and the Emergence of Algorithmic Bureaucracy
In recent years , local authorities in the UK have begun to adopt a variety of “smart” technological changes to enhance service delivery. These changes are having profound impacts on the structure of public administration. Focusing on the particular case of artificial intelligence , specifically autonomous agents and predictive analytics , a combination of desk research , a survey questionnaire , and interviews were used to better understand the …
The representative deficit in different European Party Systems
This paper explores the extent to which different party systems in Europe effectively represent their citizens. We argue that many European countries suffer from a “representative deficit”, which occurs when a significant portion of citizens have to vote for a political party whose stated views are actually quite different from their own. We measure the extent of this deficit in different European countries using data from EU Profiler and euandi,…
Studying Peace and Studying Conflict
“Peace” and (violent) “conflict” are often seen as conceptual mirror images of one another; peace is the absence of conflict, and conflict is the absence of peace. Given this conceptual interdependence, some scholars see that the study of war-making and the study of peacemaking are complementary—or even functionally identical—academic projects. Others, however, see that studies of violence and war-making are antithetic to studies of peace and pea…
Understanding News Story Chains using Information Retrieval and Network Clustering Techniques
Content analysis of news stories is a cornerstone of the communication studies field. However, much research is conducted at the level of individual news articles, despite the fact that news events are frequently presented as “stories” by news outlets: chains of connected articles offering follow up reporting as new facts emerge or covering the same event from different angles. These stories are theoretically highly important; they also create me…
A Divided Discipline? Mapping Peace and Conflict Studies
Scholars in the field of peace and conflict studies have long worried that their discipline is divided – between studies of war and war making, and studies of peace and peacemaking. However, empirical research into the existence, extent, and nature of such a division is scarce. We remedy this by addressing two questions: 1) how is work in the field of peace and conflict studies distributed between its two nominal pillars: “peace” and (violent) “c…
OpenStreetMap data for alcohol research
There is a growing interest in using OpenStreetMap [OSM] data in health research. We evaluate the usefulness of OSM data for researching the spatial availability of alcohol, a field which has been hampered by data access difficulties. We find OSM data is about 50% complete, which appears adequate for replicating findings from other studies using alcohol licensing data. Further, we show how OSM quality metrics can be used to select areas with more…
Explaining the Emergence of Political Fragmentation on Social Media
This paper is a systematic large scale study of the reasons driving political fragmentation on social media. Making use of a comparative dataset of the Twitter discussion activities of 115 political groups in 26 countries, it shows that groups which are further apart in ideological terms interact less, and that groups which sit at the extremes of the ideological scale are particularly likely to have lower patterns of interaction. Indeed, exchange…
Geodemographic biases in crowdsourced knowledge websites
Crowdsourced knowledge websites such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are increasingly attracting a critical literature which has highlighted the fact that the contributor bases of these sites are often geodemographically biased: drawn from more affluent and better educated segments of the population. However, while bias in contributors is well known, we know less about whether this also results in a bias in outcomes on these websites: or whether t…
The Social News Gap
This article seeks to explain variation in news sharing patterns on social media. It finds that news editors have considerable power to shape the social media agenda through the use of “story importance cues” but also shows that there are some areas of news reporting (such as those related to crime and disasters) where this power does not apply. This highlights the existence of a social “news gap” where social media filters out certain types of n…
Smart Technology and the Emergence of Algorithmic Bureaucracy
In recent years , local authorities in the UK have begun to adopt a variety of “smart” technological changes to enhance service delivery. These changes are having profound impacts on the structure of public administration. Focusing on the particular case of artificial intelligence , specifically autonomous agents and predictive analytics , a combination of desk research , a survey questionnaire , and interviews were used to better understand the …
Explaining the Emergence of Political Fragmentation on Social Media
This paper is a systematic large scale study of the reasons driving political fragmentation on social media. Making use of a comparative dataset of the Twitter discussion activities of 115 political groups in 26 countries, it shows that groups which are further apart in ideological terms interact less, and that groups which sit at the extremes of the ideological scale are particularly likely to have lower patterns of interaction. Indeed, exchange…
Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government
Are holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial sur…
A Divided Discipline? Mapping Peace and Conflict Studies
Scholars in the field of peace and conflict studies have long worried that their discipline is divided – between studies of war and war making, and studies of peace and peacemaking. However, empirical research into the existence, extent, and nature of such a division is scarce. We remedy this by addressing two questions: 1) how is work in the field of peace and conflict studies distributed between its two nominal pillars: “peace” and (violent) “c…
Artificial intelligence in government
Europe’s voting space and the problem of second-order elections
This article offers an empirically driven critical consideration of the idea of transnationalising Europe’s voting space, which would mean allowing European citizens to vote for a party from any member state at the European Parliament elections. We argue that such a move would reduce the second-order problem in European elections, as it would force political parties to move away from campaigning solely on national issues. We also claim that it wo…
The Life and Death of Political News
The rapid development of online media as a major location for news consumption has stimulated a variety of debates about how journalism is changing in the Internet era. Of particular importance have been worries about a potential turn toward populism, whereby journalists and editors shift away from reporting what is newsworthy to what their audience wants to hear supported by the widespread availability of audience metrics. A wealth of ethnograph…
Securitisation, terror, and control
Securitisations permit the breaking of rules: but which rules? This article argues that any given security situation could be handled by a variety of different ‘rule breaking’ procedures, and that securitisations themselves, whilst permitting rule breaking in general, do not necessarily specify in advance which rules in particular have to be broken. This begs the question: how do specific threats result in specific rule breaking measures? This ar…
Misinformation and professional news on largely unmoderated platforms
To date, there is little research to measure the scale of misinformation and understand how it spreads on largely unmoderated platforms. Our analysis of 200,000 Telegram posts demonstrates that links to known sources of misleading information are shared more often than links to professional news content, but the former stays confined to relatively few channels. We conclude that, contrary to popular received wisdom, the audience for misinformation…
Geodemographic biases in crowdsourced knowledge websites
Crowdsourced knowledge websites such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are increasingly attracting a critical literature which has highlighted the fact that the contributor bases of these sites are often geodemographically biased: drawn from more affluent and better educated segments of the population. However, while bias in contributors is well known, we know less about whether this also results in a bias in outcomes on these websites: or whether t…
In Search of the Politics of Security
Research Highlights and Abstract This article Provides an exploration of why security politics might change the behaviour of parliaments or legislatures, bringing together theory from diverse fields; Illustrates a series of potential ways of measuring legislative behaviour; Is a systematic quantitative test for the existence of security politics in a field which relies almost exclusively on qualitative methodology; Contributes to the current deba…
Non-disabled secondary school children's lived experiences of a wheelchair basketball programme delivered in the East of England
Frequently an unquestioned belief is held in British schools in the value of ‘normalized’ ability in physical education (PE). Consequently inclusion of disabled students can be problematic. Negative perceptions of disability are rarely challenged. This study investigated the embodied experiences of 49 non-disabled secondary school pupils during a programme designed to introduce disability sport to non-disabled school children entitled ‘The Wheelc…
The representative deficit in different European Party Systems
This paper explores the extent to which different party systems in Europe effectively represent their citizens. We argue that many European countries suffer from a “representative deficit”, which occurs when a significant portion of citizens have to vote for a political party whose stated views are actually quite different from their own. We measure the extent of this deficit in different European countries using data from EU Profiler and euandi,…
Studying Peace and Studying Conflict
“Peace” and (violent) “conflict” are often seen as conceptual mirror images of one another; peace is the absence of conflict, and conflict is the absence of peace. Given this conceptual interdependence, some scholars see that the study of war-making and the study of peacemaking are complementary—or even functionally identical—academic projects. Others, however, see that studies of violence and war-making are antithetic to studies of peace and pea…
New forms of cultural nationalism? American and British Indians in the Trump and Brexit Twittersphere
Diaspora networks are one of the key, but often invisible, drivers in reinforcing long‐distance nationalism towards the ‘homeland’ but simultaneously construct nationalist myths within their countries of residence. This article examines Indian diaspora supporters of Brexit and Trump in the United Kingdom and the United States who promote exclusionary nationalist imaginaries. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, it analyses British I…
OpenStreetMap data for alcohol research
There is a growing interest in using OpenStreetMap [OSM] data in health research. We evaluate the usefulness of OSM data for researching the spatial availability of alcohol, a field which has been hampered by data access difficulties. We find OSM data is about 50% complete, which appears adequate for replicating findings from other studies using alcohol licensing data. Further, we show how OSM quality metrics can be used to select areas with more…
Digital Politics in Western Democracies
Studies of the internet and politics have, it appears, entered a new phase, one which is starting to eschew grand predictions about how democracy as a whole may be altered in favour of more nuanced
Building Biometrics
If surveillance technologies are to be democratically controlled, then knowledge of these technologies is required. What do they do? How do they work? What are the costs? Yet gaining this knowledge in the context of a new surveillance technology such as biometrics can be problematic, because no settled definition exists. Competing versions of biometrics appear in both public and governmental discourse on the technology: different ideas about how …
Securitisation, terror, and control
Securitisations permit the breaking of rules: but which rules? This article argues that any given security situation could be handled by a variety of different ‘rule breaking’ procedures, and that securitisations themselves, whilst permitting rule breaking in general, do not necessarily specify in advance which rules in particular have to be broken. This begs the question: how do specific threats result in specific rule breaking measures? This ar…
Non-disabled secondary school children's lived experiences of a wheelchair basketball programme delivered in the East of England
Frequently an unquestioned belief is held in British schools in the value of ‘normalized’ ability in physical education (PE). Consequently inclusion of disabled students can be problematic. Negative perceptions of disability are rarely challenged. This study investigated the embodied experiences of 49 non-disabled secondary school pupils during a programme designed to introduce disability sport to non-disabled school children entitled ‘The Wheelc…
The Life and Death of Political News
The rapid development of online media as a major location for news consumption has stimulated a variety of debates about how journalism is changing in the Internet era. Of particular importance have been worries about a potential turn toward populism, whereby journalists and editors shift away from reporting what is newsworthy to what their audience wants to hear supported by the widespread availability of audience metrics. A wealth of ethnograph…
In Search of the Politics of Security
Research Highlights and Abstract This article Provides an exploration of why security politics might change the behaviour of parliaments or legislatures, bringing together theory from diverse fields; Illustrates a series of potential ways of measuring legislative behaviour; Is a systematic quantitative test for the existence of security politics in a field which relies almost exclusively on qualitative methodology; Contributes to the current deba…
The real component of virtual learning
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer the possibility of entirely virtual learning environments, with lectures, discussions, and assignments all distributed via the internet. The virtual nature of MOOCs presents considerable advantages to students in terms of flexibility to learn what they want, when they want. Yet despite their virtual focus, some MOOC users also seek to create face-to-face communities with students taking similar courses or…
Digital Politics in Western Democracies
Studies of the internet and politics have, it appears, entered a new phase, one which is starting to eschew grand predictions about how democracy as a whole may be altered in favour of more nuanced
Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government
Are holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial sur…
The Social News Gap
This article seeks to explain variation in news sharing patterns on social media. It finds that news editors have considerable power to shape the social media agenda through the use of “story importance cues” but also shows that there are some areas of news reporting (such as those related to crime and disasters) where this power does not apply. This highlights the existence of a social “news gap” where social media filters out certain types of n…
Europe’s voting space and the problem of second-order elections
This article offers an empirically driven critical consideration of the idea of transnationalising Europe’s voting space, which would mean allowing European citizens to vote for a party from any member state at the European Parliament elections. We argue that such a move would reduce the second-order problem in European elections, as it would force political parties to move away from campaigning solely on national issues. We also claim that it wo…
Geodemographic biases in crowdsourced knowledge websites
Crowdsourced knowledge websites such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are increasingly attracting a critical literature which has highlighted the fact that the contributor bases of these sites are often geodemographically biased: drawn from more affluent and better educated segments of the population. However, while bias in contributors is well known, we know less about whether this also results in a bias in outcomes on these websites: or whether t…
Understanding News Story Chains using Information Retrieval and Network Clustering Techniques
Content analysis of news stories is a cornerstone of the communication studies field. However, much research is conducted at the level of individual news articles, despite the fact that news events are frequently presented as “stories” by news outlets: chains of connected articles offering follow up reporting as new facts emerge or covering the same event from different angles. These stories are theoretically highly important; they also create me…
A Divided Discipline? Mapping Peace and Conflict Studies
Scholars in the field of peace and conflict studies have long worried that their discipline is divided – between studies of war and war making, and studies of peace and peacemaking. However, empirical research into the existence, extent, and nature of such a division is scarce. We remedy this by addressing two questions: 1) how is work in the field of peace and conflict studies distributed between its two nominal pillars: “peace” and (violent) “c…
OpenStreetMap data for alcohol research
There is a growing interest in using OpenStreetMap [OSM] data in health research. We evaluate the usefulness of OSM data for researching the spatial availability of alcohol, a field which has been hampered by data access difficulties. We find OSM data is about 50% complete, which appears adequate for replicating findings from other studies using alcohol licensing data. Further, we show how OSM quality metrics can be used to select areas with more…
Explaining the Emergence of Political Fragmentation on Social Media
This paper is a systematic large scale study of the reasons driving political fragmentation on social media. Making use of a comparative dataset of the Twitter discussion activities of 115 political groups in 26 countries, it shows that groups which are further apart in ideological terms interact less, and that groups which sit at the extremes of the ideological scale are particularly likely to have lower patterns of interaction. Indeed, exchange…
Studying Peace and Studying Conflict
“Peace” and (violent) “conflict” are often seen as conceptual mirror images of one another; peace is the absence of conflict, and conflict is the absence of peace. Given this conceptual interdependence, some scholars see that the study of war-making and the study of peacemaking are complementary—or even functionally identical—academic projects. Others, however, see that studies of violence and war-making are antithetic to studies of peace and pea…
SciPy 1.0
SciPy is an open-source scientific computing library for the Python programming language. Since its initial release in 2001, SciPy has become a de facto standard for leveraging scientific algorithms in Python, with over 600 unique code contributors, thousands of dependent packages, over 100,000 dependent repositories and millions of downloads per year. In this work, we provide an overview of the capabilities and development practices of SciPy 1.0…
Countering Extremists on Social Media
Extremist exploitation of social media platforms is an important regulatory question for civil society, government, and the private sector. Extremists exploit social media for a range of reasons—from spreading hateful narratives and propaganda to financing, recruitment, and sharing operational information. Policy responses to this question fit under two headings, strategic communication and content moderation. At the center of both of these polic…
Power users in online democracy
One well-known characteristic of participatory websites is that the distribution of contribution levels is highly skewed: most people who make use of the service contribute only a little, but a small minority, often known as ‘power users’, contribute a lot. These power users are understudied in the literature on online democratic participation: this article aims to fill this gap. Based on a unique observational dataset of hundreds of thousands of…
Smart Technology and the Emergence of Algorithmic Bureaucracy
In recent years , local authorities in the UK have begun to adopt a variety of “smart” technological changes to enhance service delivery. These changes are having profound impacts on the structure of public administration. Focusing on the particular case of artificial intelligence , specifically autonomous agents and predictive analytics , a combination of desk research , a survey questionnaire , and interviews were used to better understand the …
The representative deficit in different European Party Systems
This paper explores the extent to which different party systems in Europe effectively represent their citizens. We argue that many European countries suffer from a “representative deficit”, which occurs when a significant portion of citizens have to vote for a political party whose stated views are actually quite different from their own. We measure the extent of this deficit in different European countries using data from EU Profiler and euandi,…
Origines et impacts des hyper-utilisateurs et hyper-utilisatrices en cyberdémocratie. Le cas du pétitionnement en ligne
La répartition fortement inégale des niveaux d’engagement entre personnes utilisant les sites web de participation citoyenne (e-forums, sites de pétitionnement en ligne, etc.) est l’une des caractéristiques les plus connues de ces plateformes : alors que la majorité de leurs membres n’y participe que très peu, une petite minorité, souvent qualifiée d’« hyper-utilisatrice » ( power users ), y contribue abondamment. Cette minorité est sous-étudiée …
The Internet and public policy
In January 2021, the editorial team of Policy & Internet changed from the Oxford Internet Institute to the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. This article invites all the past and current editors to contribute to the future directions and discussion of internet and public policy. It is collection of six contributions covering the trajectory of the internet policy research agenda, platform power in the digital econ…
How Do Individuals in a Radical Echo Chamber React to Opposing Views? Evidence from a Content Analysis of Stormfront
Calls to “break up” radical echo chambers by injecting them with alternative viewpoints are common. Yet, thus far there is little evidence about the impact of such counter-messaging. To what extent and how do individuals who inhabit a radical echo chamber engage with messages that challenge their core beliefs? Drawing on data from the radical right forum Stormfront we address this question with a large-scale content and longitudinal analysis of u…
How Do Climate Change Skeptics Engage with Opposing Views Online? Evidence from a Major Climate Change Skeptic Forum on Reddit
Does exposure to opposing views contribute to breaking down science skepticism? In this study, we contribute to the debate by examining reactions to opposing views within a major climate change skeptic online community on “Reddit.” A large sample of posts (N = 3000) was manually coded according to whether they were opposed to climate skepticism or not, which allowed the automated classification of the full dataset of more than 50,000 posts, with …
Computer Science (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Data science (8 works) · Business (7 works)