Matt DeButts

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, with a minor from the Department of Political Science. I’m also a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, a PhD scholar at Stanford Data Science, and a former graduate fellow at the Stanford Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Prior to academia, I was also a China-based journalist for about five years. My writing from that period was published with the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and Vox, among others. As a wandering expat, I also ended up doing various other jobs, such as working as a contributing editor for the Economist Intelligence Unit. At Stanford, I’m advised by Jennifer Pan.

My research examines authoritarian influence on global media production and state-society relations in China, alongside a developing line of work on political self-censorship. My work has been published in the Journal of Communication, Social Media + Society, Communication and the Public, and China Quarterly (forthcoming), as well as in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, a conference proceeding. My research typically uses a combination of computational methods, large-scale datasets, and qualitative interviews to identify government intervention and evaluate its influence on media reporting and political behavior.

I am a proud graduate of Amherst College and a strong advocate for liberal arts education, especially in the era of artificial intelligence. I also earned an M.A. in Journalism from Stanford University and an M.A. in China Studies from Peking University, where I was a Yenching Scholar. I also lectured for a year at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.