Stefan D. McCabe

I am an Applied Scientist at Alethea. Before, I was a postdoc at George Washington University's Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics, working with Matthew Hindman and Andrew Ifedapo Thompson. My research focuses on developing methods for accurately measuring and describing online social behaviors. I received my Ph.D. from Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute in 2022, where I was advised by David Lazer. I received my master's degree from George Mason University’s Department of Computational Social Science, where I was advised by Rob Axtell. In Summer 2020, I was a research intern at Microsoft Research, working with David Rothschild.

My CV can be found here, and my resume can be found here.

Other online presences: Github, Google Scholar, Twitter, LinkedIn.

Teaching

Fall 2020

PHYS 5116: Complex Networks and Applications. Course website.

Fall 2019

DS 2001: Programming with Data (Social Science Practicum). Course website.

Publications

2024

• Green, Jon, Stefan McCabe, Sarah Shugars, Hanyu Chwe, Luke Horgan, Shuyang Cao and David Lazer. Conditionally accepted, American Political Science Review. “Curation Bubbles.” https://osf.io/udfaz/
• Stefan D. McCabe, Diogo Ferrari, Jon Green, David M. J. Lazer, and Kevin J. Esterling. 2024. “Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced the reach of misinformation on Twitter.” Nature 630: 132-140. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07524-8.
• Yang, Yunkang, Stefan McCabe, and Matthew Hindman. Forthcoming. “Does Russian Propaganda Lead or Follow? Topic coverage, user engagement, and RT and Sputnik’s agenda influence on US Media.” International Journal of Press/Politics. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19401612241271074.
• Thompson, Andrew Ifedapo, Maxwell Beveridge, Noah Axford, Molly Ahern, Fryda Cortes, Jax Martinez Franks, and Stefan McCabe. Forthcoming. “Anti-Black Political Violence and the Historical Legacy of the Great Replacement Conspiracy.” Perspectives on Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000045.
• Klein, Brennan, Timothy LaRock, Stefan McCabe, Leo Torres, Lisa Friedland, Maciej Kos, Filippo Privitera, Brennan Lake, Moritz U. G. Kraemer, John S. Brownstein, Richard Gonzalez, David Lazer, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Samuel V. Scarpino, Alessandro Vespignani, and Matteo Chinazzi. 2024. “Characterizing collective physical distancing in the U.S. during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic.” PLOS Digital Health 3 (2): e0000430. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pdig.0000430. arXiv:2212.08873. (dashboard)

2023

• Stefan McCabe, Jon Green, Pranav Goel, and David Lazer. 2023. “Inequalities in Online Representation: Who Follows their Own Member of Congress on Twitter?” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 3. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2023.021.
• Gitomer, Adina, Sarah Shugars, Ryan J. Gallagher, Stefan McCabe, Brooke Foucault Welles. 2023. “The Speech We Miss: How Keyword-Based Data Collection Obscures Participation in Online Election Discourse.” Computational Communication Research 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2023.1.11.GITO.

2022

• Green, Jon, William Hobbs, Stefan McCabe, and David Lazer. 2022. “Online Engagement with 2020 Election Misinformation and Turnout in the 2021 Georgia Runoff Election.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (34): e2115900119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115900119. (ungated · code)
• Klein, Brennan, Nicholas Generous, Matteo Chinazzi, Zarana Bhadricha, Rishab Gunashekar, Preeti Kori, Bodian Li, Stefan McCabe, Jon Green, David Lazer, Christopher R. Marsicano, Samuel V. Scarpino, and Alessandro Vespignani. PLOS Digital Health. “Higher education responses to COVID-19 in the United States: Evidence for the impacts of university policy.” https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pdig.0000065.

2021

• Hughes, Adam G., Stefan D. McCabe, William R. Hobbs, Emma Remy, Sono Shah, and David M. J. Lazer. 2021. “Using Administrative Records and Survey Data to Construct Samples of Tweeters and Tweets.” Public Opinion Quarterly 85 (S1): 323-346. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfab020. (ungated · code)
• McCabe, Stefan, Leo Torres, Timothy LaRock, Syed Arefinul Haque, Chia-Hung Yang, Harrison Hartle, and Brennan Klein. 2021. “netrd: A library for network reconstruction and graph distances.” Journal of Open Source Software 6 (62): 2990. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02990. arXiv: 2010.16019 (code)
• Shugars, Sarah, Adina Gitomer, Stefan D. McCabe, Ryan J. Gallagher, Kenneth Joseph, Nir Grinberg, Larissa Doroshenko, Brooke Foucult Welles, and David Lazer. 2021. “Pandemics, Protests, and Publics: Demographic Activity and Engagement on Twitter in 2020.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2021.002 (code)

2020

• Hartle, Harrison, Brennan Klein, Stefan McCabe, Alexander Daniels, Guillaume St-Onge, Charles Murphy, and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne. 2020. “Network Comparison and the Within-Ensemble Graph Distance.” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 476 (2243): 20190744. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0744. arXiv:2008.02415 (code)

Working Papers

• Andrew Ifedapo Thompson, Stefan McCabe, and Babak Bahador. Submitted. “The Long Shadow of the Civil War: The Recurrent Historical Centrality of Anti-Black Political Threat in Eroding Public Support for American Democracy.” https://osf.io/fp35j/
• Busby, Ethan, Andrew Ifedapo Thompson, and Stefan McCabe. Under review. “Party-Ideology Sorting in the United States: Correlates and Consequences.”
• Stefan McCabe, Jon Green, Allison Wan, and David Lazer. In preparation. “New Tweetscores.” https://osf.io/794va/

Conference Presentations

2022

• “New Tweetscores, or, Did Donald Trump Break Tweetscores?,” oral presentation, Political Networks Conference, Chicago, IL.
• “Despair or Defiance?,” oral presentation, Politics and Computational Social Science Conference, online conference.
• “New Tweetscores, or, Did Donald Trump Break Tweetscores?,” oral presentation, Midwestern Political Science Assocation, Chicago, IL.

2021

• “Despair or Defiance?,” oral presentation, American Political Science Association, online conference.
• “Curation Bubbles,” oral presentation, Politics and Computational Social Science, online conference.
• “How Representative are the (Online) Represented?,” oral presentation, Networks 2021, online conference.
• “How Representative are the (Online) Represented?,” oral presentation, Political Networks Conference, online conference.
• “Curation Bubbles,” oral presentation, Midwestern Political Science Association, online conference.

2020

• “Twitter is Real Life (for Journalists),” oral presentation, PaCSS, online conference.
• “A Vocal Minority,” oral presentation, IC2S2, online conference. (video · slides)

2019

• “Time Scales of Social Influence,” oral presentation, Midwestern Political Science Assocation, Chicago, IL.
• “Time Scales of Social Influence,” oral presentation, Political Networks Conference, Durham, NC.
• “Local Edge Perturbation,” poster, NetSci, Burlington, VT.
• “Time Scales of Social Influence,” oral presentation, Sunbelt Conference, Montréal.
• “Time Scales of Social Influence,” oral presentation, American Political Science Assocation, Washington DC.

Other Resources

As a grad student, I ran a tutorial on using R for incoming doctoral students at the Network Science Institute. The most recent version of this tutorial can be found here (HTML, PDF).