Megan Squire

Squire grew up in a conservative Christian household near Virginia Beach, Virginia. She attended the College of William & Mary, where she earned a double major in art history and public policy. She took a secretarial job at an antivirus software company after becoming interested in computers. After receiving her PhD from Nova Southeastern University in Florida, she worked at a startup in North Carolina and then began teaching at Elon University.

Squire's research focuses on how online extremism is mediated by social media networks, including Telegram,{{cite news |last1=Hsu |first1=Tiffany |title=2,200 Viewed Germany Shooting Before Twitch Removed Post |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/business/twitch-germany-shooting.html |access-date=31 March 2020 |work=The New York Times |date=9 October 2019}}{{Cite web |last=Carnell |first=Henry |title=Israel-Palestine disinformation is rampant. Here's how to avoid it. |url=https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/israel-palestine-interview-series-gaza-viral-disinformation-social-media/ |access-date=2025-02-25 |website=Mother Jones |language=en-US}} Facebook,{{cite news |last1=Daro |first1=Ishmael |title=Here's How Anti-Muslim Groups On Facebook Overlap With A Range Of Far-Right Extremism |url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ishmaeldaro/anti-muslim-content-facebook-groups-study |access-date=31 March 2020 |work=BuzzFeed News |date=4 August 2018 |language=en}} and other platforms.

Squire performed research in 2018 on anti-Muslim Facebook groups, using Facebook's Graph API to create a dataset of 700,000 members from 1,870 open and closed groups with ideologies including anti-Muslim, white nationalist, neo-Confederate, and more. The data was gathered over ten months. She found that membership in one such group correlated highly with the chance of being in another group, indicating that anti-Muslim sentiment acted as a "common denominator" for membership in related groups. Her research has been cited in lawsuits against Facebook for failing to remove such groups.{{cite news | last1=Allyn | first1=Bobby | title='Stop Lying': Muslim Rights Group Sues Facebook Over Claims It Removes Hate Groups | url=https://www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985143101/stop-lying-muslim-rights-group-sues-facebook-over-claims-it-removes-hate-groups |access-date=18 Feb 2022 |work=NPR |date=8 April 2021 |language=en}}

She has also explored how the younger generation of far right extremists, including Nick Fuentes and Patrick Casey, use video livestreaming and gaming platforms to earn money. A study in November 2020 showed that a handful of leaders of the global white nationalist movement are raising significant sums of money. As of November 2020, Squires' research indicated that Fuentes was earning about $326 per day off of DLive, or about $119,000 per year.{{cite news |last1=Gais |first1=Hannah | last2=Hayden | first2=Michael |title=Extremists Are Cashing in on a Youth-Targeted Gaming Website |url=https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/11/17/extremists-are-cashing-youth-targeted-gaming-website |access-date=18 Feb 2022 |work=Southern Poverty Law Center |date=17 November 2020 |language=en}} "Most donations are small amounts of money, but some donors give very, very large amounts... Some users are giving $10,000 to $20,000 a month to streamers on Dlive."{{cite news |last1=Browning |first1=Kellen | last2=Lorenz | first2=Taylor |title=Pro-Trump Mob Livestreamed Its Rampage, and Made Money Doing It | url= https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-mob.html| access-date=18 Feb 2022 |work=New York Times |date=8 January 2021 |language=en}} Her research using information gleaned from the public APIs of Venmo and Facebook showed that the Proud Boys were taking dues despite claims{{Says who|date=October 2024}} to the contrary.{{cite news |last1=Carless |first1=Will |date=5 February 2021 |title=Crowdfunding hate: How white supremacists and other extremists raise money from legions of online followers |url=https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/05/bitcoin-crowdfunding-used-white-supremacists-far-right-extremists/4300688001/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221202125243/https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/05/bitcoin-crowdfunding-used-white-supremacists-far-right-extremists/4300688001/ |archive-date=2 Dec 2022 |access-date=18 Feb 2022 |work=USA Today |language=en}}{{Cite book |last=Squire |first=Megan |chapter=Understanding Gray Networks Using Social Media Trace Data |series=Lecture Notes in Computer Science |date=2019 |volume=11864 |editor-last=Weber |editor-first=Ingmar |editor2-last=Darwish |editor2-first=Kareem M. |editor3-last=Wagner |editor3-first=Claudia |editor4-last=Zagheni |editor4-first=Emilio |editor5-last=Nelson |editor5-first=Laura |editor6-last=Aref |editor6-first=Samin |editor7-last=Flöck |editor7-first=Fabian |title=Social Informatics |chapter-url=https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-34971-4_14 |language=en |location=Cham |publisher=Springer International Publishing |pages=202–217 |doi=10.1007/978-3-030-34971-4_14 |isbn=978-3-030-34971-4}}

In 2024, Squire led an SPLC research project that claimed that the social media and messaging app Telegram was prone to suggesting particularly dangerous and extremist content to users. The center's report, titled "Telegram’s Toxic Recommendations," examined thousands of content channels on the app and alleges that even searches for innocuous topics connected users to channels devoted to conspiracy theories and racist ideologies. {{Cite web |date=2024-12-16 |title=Telegram app recommends extremist content to users, study finds |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgrvw29x4jo |access-date=2025-03-31 |website=www.bbc.com |language=en-GB}}{{Cite web |title=Telegram promotes extremism, new study reveals |url=https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/1262349-telegram-promotes-extremism-new-study-reveals |access-date=2025-03-31 |website=www.thenews.com.pk |language=en}}

Squire is also the author of two books: Clean Data - Data Science Strategies for Tackling Dirty Data, and Mastering Data Mining with Python - Find Patterns Hidden in Your Data.{{Cite web |title=Megan Squire |url=https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14027552.Megan_Squire |access-date=2025-02-09 |website=www.goodreads.com}}

Squire first engaged in activism at age 15, when she joined her school environmental club to protest pollution at an industrial cattle farm. While teaching at Elon, she protested the war in Iraq. In 2008, Squire campaigned for the future US President Obama; however, following Obama's handling of the Great Recession, Squire became disillusioned with electoral politics and began engaging with the Occupy movement.{{cite magazine |last1=Clark |first1=Doug Bock |title=Meet Antifa's Secret Weapon Against Far-Right Extremists |url=https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-antifa-data-mining/ |access-date=28 April 2020 |magazine=Wired |date=16 January 2018 |language=en}}

Though she doesn't consider herself to be part of the Antifa movement, they have been said to be among her "strongest allies" and she is "unwilling" to condemn the use of political violence.

In August 2017, Squire documented concrete evidence from social media of white supremacist supporters planning to attend the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. She attended a counterprotest that clashed violently with the far-right groups.

Amid a rise in fascist and neo-Nazi pamphleting of college campuses, Squire put together an interactive map of such events. By 14 November 2017, she had documented over 200 such occurrences.{{cite news |last1=Hayden |first1=Michael Edison |title=It's OK to Be White: How Fox News Is Helping to Spread Neo-Nazi Propaganda |url=https://www.newsweek.com/neo-nazi-david-duke-backed-meme-was-reported-tucker-carlson-without-context-714655 |work=Newsweek |date=19 November 2017}}

In 2020, at an anti-racism protest outside the Alamance County Courthouse in downtown Graham, Squire was assaulted by two members of a pro-Confederate monument group described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Both assailants were arrested and charged, one charged for assault on a female and the other for disorderly conduct.{{cite news |last1=Brown |first1=Maggie |last2=Leah |first2=Heather |title=Elon professor who researches right-wing extremist groups assaulted in Alamance County |url=https://www.wral.com/elon-professor-who-researches-right-wing-extremist-groups-assaulted-in-alamance-county/19154511/ |work=WRAL |date=21 June 2020 |language=en}}{{cite news |last1=Duncan |first1=Charles |title=Professor who studies hate groups attacked at Confederate statue protest, NC police say |url=https://www.modbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article243708032.html |work=The Modesto Bee |date=22 June 2020}}

In 2019, her presentation "Understanding Gray Networks Using Social Media Trace Data" was named runner-up for Best Paper at the International Conference on Social Informatics. In 2022, Squire was named a Belfer Fellow by the Anti-Defamation League for her work to "collect, analyze, and visualize quantitative data from social media platforms to understand the impact of various types and levels of deplatforming and demonetization on far-right individuals and groups."{{cite news |title=ADL's Center for Technology and Society Announces Fourth Class of Belfer Fellows | url=https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adls-center-for-technology-and-society-announces-fourth-class-of-belfer-fellows | access-date=18 Feb 2022 |work=Anti-Defamation League |date=1 September 2021 |language=en}} She was a Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center before taking a role as the organization's Deputy Director for Data Analytics and Open-Source Intelligence.{{cite news | last1=Karbal | first1=Ian | title=The mob that stormed the Capitol was its own media |url=https://www.cjr.org/cjr_outbox/the-mob-that-stormed-the-capital-was-its-own-media.php |access-date=18 Feb 2022 |work=Columbia Journalism Review |date=8 January 2021 |language=en}}{{Cite web |title=Megan Squire |url=https://www.splcenter.org/about/staff/megan-squire |access-date=2024-10-28 |website=Southern Poverty Law Center |language=en}}

{{reflist}}

{{authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Squire, Megan}}

Category:College of William & Mary alumni

Category:American computer science educators

Category:Elon University faculty

Category:Nova Southeastern University alumni

Category:People from North Carolina

Category:People from Virginia

Category:American women computer scientists

Category:American computer scientists

Category:Anti-fascism

Category:Living people

Category:American women academics