Alex Newhouse

Political violence · online extremism · computational social science

Alex Newhouse — computational political scientist at CU Boulder. Online extremism, political violence, NLP, networks, and causal inference.

On the academic job market · 2027–28

PhD Candidate · Political Science · CU Boulder

Alex Newhouse

I study how online communities turn into offline political violence — using transformer NLP, social network analysis, and time-series causal inference.

I’m a computational political scientist, Humane Studies Fellow, and National Humanities Alliance Research Fellow. Before CU Boulder, I served as Deputy Director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism & Counterterrorism and as an investigative consultant to the U.S. House Select Committee on January 6th.

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Job market paper

“‘The Happening Is Coming’: Apocalyptic Rhetoric on 4chan Following Mass Casualty Attacks”

A transformer classifier and intervention analysis of 11 years of 4chan /pol/ posts showing that online apocalypticism spikes after mass-casualty terrorist attacks — evidence of feedback loops between digital communities and offline violence. Presented at APSA 2025. PDF available on request.

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What I work on

Research

Online-offline radicalization, neo-fascist networks, AI safety, and gaming as a site of political socialization.

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Tools & Code

NLP classifiers, datasets, and reproducible pipelines for studying extremist text, networks, and online communities at scale.

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Teaching

Quantitative methods, computational social science, political violence, and original R tutorials for undergraduate methods students.

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For hiring committees, policy teams, and collaborators

At a glance

Scholarly identity

Comparative politics and methodology scholar focused on decentralized political violence, platform affordances, and online collective action.

Political violence Extremism Computational social science

Technical depth

I build production-grade pipelines with transformer models, network analysis, interrupted time series, and large-scale social media data.

NLP Networks Causal inference

Applied impact

My work has supported federal investigations, gaming-platform trust & safety, media explainers, and policy-facing extremism research.

Jan. 6 Committee Gaming platforms Policy translation

Selected outputs

Selected work

• Newhouse, A. & Kowert, R. (2025). Extremist Identity Creation Through Performative Infighting on Steam. Frontiers in Psychology.
• Kowert, R., Kilmer, E., & Newhouse, A. (2024). Taking it to the Extreme: Prevalence and Nature of Extremist Sentiment in Games. Frontiers in Psychology.
• Newhouse, A. (2021). The Threat is the Network: The Multi-Node Structure of Neo-Fascist Accelerationism. CTC Sentinel.
• McGuffie, K. & Newhouse, A. (2020). The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Advanced Neural Language Models. arXiv.

Full publication list →

Evidence of reach

Impact

$1.38M Funding as PI

52 Students mentored

276K Article reads

3 Courses as instructor

Public engagement

Featured in

Washington Post · New York Times · NPR · BBC · Politico · Wired · Bloomberg · Meet the Press · Vice · Axios · FiveThirtyEight · ProPublica

Freshness signal

Recent

• 2026-04-14 Successfully defended dissertation prospectus.
• 2025-10-01 Awarded a Humane Studies Fellowship to study polarization in LLMs.
• 2025-10-01 Began Research Fellowship with the National Humanities Alliance Humanities Workforce Program.
• 2025-09-01 Presented job-market paper at APSA 2025.
• 2025-08-01 New article in Frontiers in Psychology on extremist identity formation on Steam.

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