// about matt
About Matt
I help people understand what is really going on in complicated technologies. My work sits at the intersection of technology, human behavior, and society, with a particular focus on how people interact with online systems, where harms emerge, and how those systems can be improved.
Why people bring me in
I'm most useful when the problem is technically complicated, the evidence looks messy or contradictory, and the stakes are high. Often the challenge is not a lack of data, but a lack of clarity about how the system works, how people behave within it, and what the evidence does or does not show.
I bring a combination of deep platform experience (Meta, civic integrity, election preparedness), peer-reviewed research credibility (60+ publications, 22,000+ citations), and a track record of translating technical complexity into clear, actionable language for legal, policy, and organizational audiences.
From academia to platforms
I started as a social psychologist. As an award-winning professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in both the psychology and political science departments, I directed a research lab studying intergroup conflict, ideological migration, and motivated reasoning. I published 60+ peer-reviewed articles that have been cited 22,000+ times, and my work was featured in major outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The LA Times, and The Guardian.
Along the way, I co-founded Civil Politics with Jon Haidt and Ravi Iyer — a non-profit dedicated to evidence-based practices for constructive civil dialogue. I served as Research Director at the Constructive Dialogue Institute (originally the OpenMind Platform), an ed-tech startup aiming to promote more constructive dialogue. There, I raised ~$4.3M in grants and gifts, engineered a data pipeline, built a real-time dashboard, conducted numerous studies and a cluster-randomized controlled trial experiment, and helped grow the user base from 350 students at 5 universities to more than 16,000 students at 400+ universities.
At Meta, I led research on civic integrity, election preparedness, and high-stakes product and policy questions related to what billions of people see online. That experience gave me direct exposure to how large-scale technologies operate in practice — and how product decisions, incentives, and human behavior can interact in unexpected and sometimes harmful ways.
What I do now
Since leaving Meta, I've put my experience to work independently across advisory projects, expert witness engagements, workshops, speaking, and public-interest work.
As Senior Advisor at USC's Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision-Making, I oversaw the Social Media Index — the first publicly available longitudinal scientific comparison of positive and negative experiences across major social platforms.
As a Resident Research & Policy Fellow at the Integrity Institute, I wrote best-practices guides including the EDMO platform data handbook, advised the US Senate Judiciary Committee ahead of the 2024 child safety hearings with tech CEOs, and ran workshops for the European Commission, the European Digital Media Observatory, and the Bamako Forum.
My work today spans trust and safety, child safety, well-being, recommendation systems, platform governance, misinformation, technology-facilitated political violence, gender-based harms, and the broader relationship between technology and society. The through-line is the same: helping people make sense of complex systems clearly enough to improve them.
I care deeply about helping non-experts understand complicated systems without flattening the details that matter.
That means translating technical, behavioral, and institutional complexity into language that lawyers, policymakers, journalists, researchers, and organizations can actually use.
// current roles
Senior Advisor
Neely Center for Ethical Leadership & Decision-Making, USC
Founder and Director
Unmoderated Insights
Independent advisor, speaker, and expert witness
Creator
Show Me The Data