Lucas Wright is a scholar of digital platforms, online governance, and technology policy. Lucas’s work examines the practice of online safety and security professionals, with a focus on how their fields are shaped by the law, discourses of harm and security, and markets for solutions, as well as the effect this practice has on individual and collective rights. His recent research has paid particular attention to the role of commercial intermediaries who sell compliance services for content moderation, AI safety, and disinformation monitoring. He employs both qualitative methods (interviews, textual and discourse analysis, participant observation) and quantitative approaches (online field experiments and quasi-experiments).
His scholarship has been published in Social Media & Society, Platforms & Society, and the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), and he has a forthcoming article in Nature Human Behaviour on automated copyright enforcement. He has also written for popular outlets including Tech Policy Press and Quartz.
In addition to his academic work, Lucas has worked on online safety in multiple civil society roles and spent a summer working on AI policy in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. He joins Northeastern with a joint appointment between Communication Studies (primary) and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs (secondary).
Lucas will spend the 2026-2027 academic year as a Resident Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project.
Departments
Communication Studies
Education
- Ph.D., Communication, Cornell University
- MSc, Social Science of the Internet, University of Oxford
- BA, Political Science, American University