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

Why is public health struggling to make its technologies good?

In this episode, Yale public health scholar and medical anthropologist Chelsey R. Carter joins Eleanor Drage to explore the technologies of public health. They discuss how eye-gaze devices can help people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) communicate, and why assistive technology can fail when users don’t receive the training and support they need. Chelsey also tells us about racial bias in neurological care that National Football League (NFL) players receive after injuries, and shares how the Black Genome Project approaches representation and lived experience in genomics. From COVID-19 and public health policy to precision medicine and the ethics of health technology, this conversation asks who benefits from innovation, and what it takes to make healthcare more equitable. Essential listening for anyone interested in disability justice, Black health, medical anthropology, health equity, and the relationship between technology, race, and care.

Reading List:

• Chelsey’s website
• The Difference of Black ALS Anti-Bodies for Survival
• Weathering Anti-Blackness
• Priorities and Recommendations to Make ALS a Livable Disease Emanating from the 2024 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Report Living with ALS
• Are diverse databases actually creating equity in genomics?
• Hope tempered by caution: Public beliefs in the United States about the benefits and drawbacks of using epigenetic technologies in clinical care.
• Interpersonal associations in mental health outcomes of people living with ALS, caregivers, and dyads: Implications for the role of clinicians
• Examining relationships between multifactorial health beliefs and beliefs about the social implications of genetics
• The Difference of Black ALS Anti‐Bodies for Survival
• Anti‐Bodies, Anti‐Body: A Black Feminist Call and Response: Introduction
• St. Louis enhancing engagement and retention (STEER) in HIV/AIDS care: a participatory intersectional needs assessment for intervention and implementation planning
• Strengthening the US Health Workforce to End the HIV Epidemic: Lessons Learned From 11 EHE Jurisdictions
• Patients as knowledge partners in the context of complex chronic conditions
• Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research in Cardiovascular Care: Opportunities in the Coming Decades
• Psychological distress and life satisfaction among Black working adults in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Past Is Prologue: Dismantling Colonial Legacies to Advance Black Health Equity in the United States
• “They need people to actually show up in their lives:” deploying community health workers to improve mental health and substance use outcomes among PLWH
• The Weather of Anti-Blackness: Is Health Equity Enough?
• Inclusive Recruitment Strategies to Maximize Sociodemographic Diversity among Participants: A St. Louis Case Study
• Gaslighting: ALS, anti‐Blackness, and medicine

Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo

In this episode of The Good Robot, Eleanor Drage speaks with Cassandra Hartblay, anthropologist, writer, playwright, and author of Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia.

They explore disability, accessibility, technology, and inclusive design in contemporary Russia, examining how the unique political context shapes coping mechanisms for disabled people living in inaccessible and poorly maintained cities.

We also discuss the Sochi 2014 Olympics and Paralympics, disability advocacy, and the relationship between war and disability. Through stories of wheelchair users, activists, architects, and everyday experiences of inaccessible environments, the episode asks what it really means to create technology and design that enables people to move, participate, and live with greater freedom.

Reading List:

• Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia
• Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice by Xenia Cherkaev
• Unmaking Russia's Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics by Michele Rivkin-Fish
• Keywords for Ethnography and Design, Cultural Anthropology website
• The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning by Tanya Titchkosky
• Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo