For the past 25 years, Matthew Williams has studied the social and psychological harms brought about by the internet. He is Professor of Criminology at Cardiff University, external at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on online harms and social media.
He founded and directs the multi-million-pound HateLab, a nonprofit with an ambitious civic mission to democratise the latest AI and data science capabilities amongst civil society organisations, so that they can reliably monitor and counter online harms brought about by the expansive use of social media. The Lab has published ground-breaking investigations. Matthew acts as a non-executive director for nisien.ai, a commercial spin-out of HateLab, that provides online harms monitoring and mitigation services to governments and corporations across the world.
His research has appeared in documentaries for BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, ITV, Channel 4, CBS, Amazon Studios, and Netflix, in popular podcasts including Niall Breslin’s Where is My Mind, The Joe Marler Show, Johnathan McCrea’s Futureproof, If it Bleeds it Leads, The Douglas Coleman Show, John Fugelsang’s Tell Me Everything and Cally Beaton’s Namaste Motherf**kers, and in major publications including the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Telegraph, the Times, the Herald, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American and New Scientist.
In 2021, Matthew published the trade book The Science of Hate: How prejudice becomes hate and what we can do to stop it, with Faber and Faber in the UK (US February 2023), with translation rights sold to eight publishers around the world.