I’m Will Schulz. I received my PhD in 2024 from the Politics Department at Princeton University, and recently joined the Stanford Social Media Lab as a Postdoctoral Scholar.

In my research, I develop methods to both generate and analyze data on ordinary people’s speech, which I collect using surveys, public APIs, and online experiments.

My dissertation investigates why online discourse is polarized by partisan orthodoxy, despite the fact that most people’s political views are moderate and nuanced. I find the discrepancy is largely explained by self-censorship of moderate and heterodox speech – or, put conversely, the outsize tendency of polarized individuals to speak up online.

My latest project uses Mastodon as a tool to conduct experiments on simulated online platforms, in order to understand how online discourse is shaped by the interaction of users’ social incentives with platforms’ technological affordances.