How do mainstream social media platforms become breeding grounds for online radicalization? In this episode of The Good Robot, host Dr. Eleanor Drage sits down with Raphael Hernandes, a Cambridge PhD researcher, award-winning data journalist, and reporter for The Guardian and Folha de São Paulo. Together, they delve into The Guardian's European Press Prize–winning investigation into 16 interconnected Facebook groups with over 600,000 members, revealing how ordinary online communities and retirement-age administrators quietly normalize anti-immigrant sentiment, nativism, and far-right rhetoric.

Raphael also warns against the growing crisis of data access as major tech platforms increasingly close their backends to independent researchers. Tune in for a fascinating discussion on how social media platforms are dodging accountability, the subtle mechanics of online radicalization, and why public interest auditing is more crucial than ever for the future of digital communications.

Reading List:

• Raphael’s website
• Inside the everyday Facebook networks where far-right ideas grow
• Reporting on the systems that shape what people know
• Report Launch: Data Not Found
• AI, journalism, and critical AI literacy: exploring journalists’ perspectives on AI and responsible reporting
• Auditing Google's Search Algorithm: Measuring News Diversity Across Brazil, the UK, and the US
• Artificial Intelligence in Brazilian News: A Mixed-Methods Analysis
• LLMs left, right, and center: Assessing GPT's capabilities to label political bias from web domains
• Using GPT to Assess the Political Bias of News Outlets

Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo