PRICKING THE BUBBLE

WHEN WE MET in early March, Jonathan Albright was still shrugging off a sleepless weekend. It was a few weeks after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had killed 17 people, most of them teenagers, and promptly turned the internet into a cesspool of finger pointing and conspiracy slinging. Within days, ultraconservative YouTube stars like Alex Jones had rallied their supporters behind the bogus claim that the students who survived and took to the press to call for gun control were merely actors. Within a week, one of these videos had topped YouTube's Trending section.

Albright, the research director for Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, probes the way information moves through the web. He was amazed by the speed with which the conspiracies had advanced from tiny corners of the web to YouTube's front page. How could this happen so quickly? he wondered.

So that weekend, sitting alone in his studio apartment at the northern tip of Manhattan, Albright pulled an all-nighter, following YouTube recommendations down a dark vortex that led from one conspiracy theory video to another until he'd collected data on roughly 9,000 videos. On Sunday, he wrote about his findings on Medium. By Monday, his investigation was the subject of a top story on Buzzfeed News. And by Thursday, when I met Albright at his office, he was chugging a bottle of Super Coffee (equal parts caffeine boost and protein shake) to stay awake.

At that point, I knew Albright mainly through his work, which had already been featured on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. That, and his habit of sending me rapid-fire Signal and Twitter messages that cryptically indicated he'd discovered something new that the world needed to know. They came five at a time, loaded with screenshots, links to cached websites, and excerpts from congressional testimony, all of which he had archived as evidence in his one-man quest to uncover how information gets manipulated as it makes its way through the public bloodstream. This is how Albright has helped break some of the biggest stories in tech over the past year: by sending journalists a direct message late in the night that sounds half-crazy, but is actually an epic scoop--that is, if you can jump on it before he impatiently tweets it out.

So when I finally asked to meet Albright, the man who's been conducting some of the most consequential and prolific research on the tech industry's multitudinous screwups, I expected to find a scene straight out of Carrie Mathison's apartment: yards of red string connecting thumbtacked photos of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Bannon, and Vladimir Putin. At the very least, rows of post-docs tapping away on their Macbooks, populating Excel spreadsheets with tips to feed Albright their latest.

Instead, his office--if you can call it that--sits inside a stuffy, lightless storage space in the basement of Columbia University's journalism school. The day we met, Albright, who looks at least a decade younger than his 40 years, was dressed in a red, white, and blue button-down, khakis, and a pair of hiking boots that haven't seen much use since he moved from North Carolina to New York a little more than a year ago.

From a hole in the ceiling, two plastic tubes snaked into a blue recycling bin, a temporary solution to prevent a leaky pipe from destroying Albright's computer. His colleague has brightened her half of the room with photos and a desk full of books. Albright's side is almost empty, aside from a space heater and three suitcases he keeps at the ready as go-bags for his next international lecture. A faux window in the wall opens on yet another wall inside the basement, or as Albright calls it, "basically hell."

And yet, out of this humble place, equipped with little more than a laptop, Albright has become a sort of detective of digital misdeeds. He's the one who tipped off The Washington Post last October to the fact that Russian trolls at the Internet Research Agency reached millions more people on Facebook than the social media giant initially let on. It's Albright's research that helped build a bruising story in The New York Times on how the Russians used fake identities to stoke American rage. He discovered a trove of exposed Cambridge Analytica tools in the online code repository Github, long before most people knew the shady, defunct data firm's name.

Working at all hours of the night digging through data, Albright has become an invaluable and inexhaustible resource for reporters trying to make sense of tech titans' tremendous and unchecked power.

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