We are pleased to share our new Moonshot Team Spotlight Series.
At Moonshot, we are very proud of our company culture and values. We believe that building a diverse team with a range of experiences and expertise helps us better understand online harms and violent extremism and enables us to design and deliver the effective work we do to counter them.
This series will shine a light on what it’s like to work at Moonshot, the different projects we work on, and our company culture and values from the perspective of our team. The series will feature members of the Moonshot Team with a variety of backgrounds, skills, and experiences — not everyone joins us from the online harms or violent extremism sectors. While the profiles will be anonymous due to the sensitive work we do, we hope that the series will provide a snapshot of the Moonshot Team, our work, and our culture and values.
Moonshot Analyst
Analysts are critical to the work we do at Moonshot. They are essential to the design and delivery of our projects, from insights and threat monitoring to interventions and capacity building. Analysts have the opportunity to work across multiple areas of harms and geographies through both using and developing new, innovative methodologies.
Our Analyst this week has worked with Moonshot for over three years on projects focusing on both the violent far-right and violent Islamist groups across a wide range of geographies including North America, Europe, and Asia.
What is your background? What were you doing before joining Moonshot?
After studying for both my undergraduate (BA History) and masters (MSc International Security and Risk) at the University of Southampton, I began my career as a Parliamentary Research Intern for an MP before moving on to work for a think tank where I pursued my research interests looking at how violent extremists infiltrate popular culture, and the role of technology, particularly AI, in tackling violent extremist content online.
What inspired you to work in this space?
My interest in countering violent extremism began at university after studying a module focusing on the U.S. War on Terror. After university, I worked in multiple sectors exploring different roles and the different ways I could make a positive contribution to preventing and countering violent extremism. Networking played a huge role in learning more about the sector. I came across Moonshot’s work while working for another company. I was impressed by Moonshot’s approach and methods and I felt that it was a good fit for me so I reached out and asked if there were any roles available.
What is the most interesting part of your role
As an Analyst I have the unique opportunity to understand firsthand the individuals who may be looking to consume violent extremist content online. Tracking this activity on a number of online platforms across the globe allows us not only to track appetite for violent content, but it is also an opportunity to reach those at risk and change their path. Every day that I am helping to bridge the gap between those susceptible to violent extremist messaging and those credible voices against that messaging is a highlight of my role.
What is your team like?
Everyone who works at Moonshot is fun, supportive, creative, friendly, and collaborative. My favorite thing about the team is how we all come together from different backgrounds and experiences with the goal of making a difference in this sector. It creates such a unique working environment of mutual respect and enthusiasm that I have not experienced anywhere else.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work?
At Moonshot, we prioritize the people behind the data and recognize the humanity behind some of the awful areas of harm we work on. This motivates me to help those at risk of online harm and play an important role in providing opportunities for those individuals to choose a different path for themselves.
What is the most challenging part of your role?
The most challenging aspect of our work is the violent extremist and harmful content we are exposed to during our research. As researchers we operate at a very vulnerable point in a user’s journey online and it’s difficult not to be affected by the harmful behaviors we see everyday. Luckily, we have access to many services at Moonshot to assist with the potential impact on our mental health, for example awareness training on vicarious trauma.
What is the most important thing you have learned since joining Moonshot?
The importance of collaboration with unlikely partners to work towards a better outcome. For example, I am often asked why Moonshot works with big social media companies. Social media platforms are at the center of the debate on how to tackle online harms. Many have committed to increase the use of new technologies to help identify, report, and remove harmful content. However, it is not hard to find reports of these companies falling short of expectations. Working at Moonshot has helped me to understand that platforms are struggling to find a balance between legitimate censorship and freedom of speech; they see themselves as communities that enable conversation and global connectivity, not as regulators. This is why we must work together to see better outcomes through directly addressing high-risk, illegal and harmful content present on different platforms, but also through finding ways to redirect audiences searching for harmful content towards more constructive alternative messages.
What did you expect a company like Moonshot to be like before you joined? Did anything surprise you?
This sector has a well-documented controversial, and in many ways, harmful history. I was concerned that I would struggle to find a company that mirrored my ethical values. I started Moonshot the same week as the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand and this experience changed my perspective completely. The company-wide response in the wake of this horrific attack confirmed that I found a company that embodied my own values; a company that puts kindness, authenticity, and accountability above all else while continually striving to learn and question the way we work and approach online harms.
What is unique about working with Moonshot?
The freedom we have to experiment, learn through failure, and pivot to what works best. Compared to the public sector, which can be very slow, as a private company we can innovate more. For example, in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder by a police officer in March 2021 and the devastating year of male violence against women and girls in the UK that followed, I felt compelled to do something in this space. Through my role at Moonshot I began to research how I could best inform our work on this subject matter. This raised a number of important questions about sexual misconduct on UK university campuses and the problem of harmful misogyny arising in online student spaces; a subject matter I would not have otherwise had the opportunity to pursue had Moonshot not encouraged a culture of innovation and experimentation.
Tell us about a project you’ve worked on
My work on the Moonshot report From Shitposting to Sedition (2020) will always stick with me. Between September and December 2020 during the US Election, Moonshot safeguarded over 34,000 searches related to violence or violence-inciting disinformation related to the election, offering individuals the opportunity to disengage from harm through safer content choices.
This project highlighted the relationship between offline events and online violent extremist behavior. For example, during the first presidential debate, when asked to condemn white supremacist militia groups and the Proud Boys specifically, President Trump called on the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Almost immediately, this slogan became a rallying cry for the group and we saw a dramatic increase in searches. In the week following Trump’s statement, we identified:
- A 138% rise in overall search activity for armed groups;
- 137 searches for “Proud Boys membership”;
- 1,781% increase in searches for armed group-related forums, such as “Proud Boys Twitter”;
- 417 new members to the “Proud Boys Uncensored” Telegram channel.
In this project we also identified a distinct attitudinal shift following the results of the election where searches among these violent extremist communities became tinged with despair and disbelief, which ultimately contributed to the build up towards the insurrection of the capital on Jan 6, 2021. For me, this project highlighted the importance of Moonshot’s work in providing individuals searching for harmful content with an opportunity to get help.
In your opinion, what is the most significant trend to watch in the online harms space at the moment?
The research field of gaming and extremism is vastly understudied and misunderstood. Existing research focuses heavily on trying to identify direct links between video games, violence and radicalisation. It is important to acknowledge that violent extremists are attempting to exploit the gaming landscape with its deep integration with pop culture in order to capitalize on its access to young audiences. However, to better understand the role of gaming in violent extremism, we need to develop our understanding of how the gaming environment is being co-opted by violent extremists to bring already radicalized people together and investigate how gaming-methodologies can be used to prevent and counter this risk.
Finally, when you were younger what career did you dream of pursuing?
When I was younger I wanted to be a musical theater performer. I have been performing since I was around eight years old and I have performed in over 40 different shows from Little Shop of Horrors and Sweeney Todd to Into the Woods and Guys and Dolls. Now, my musical theater hobbies allow me to take a step back from the stresses of my job and lose myself in the joviality of the stage.
Learn more about our company culture and values.
Interested in a career at Moonshot?
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