The researcher analysing far-right rhetoric on Facebook

Tell us about the award you have been nominated for?

I am delighted to have been nominated for one of the most important journalism awards in Europe, the European Press Prize , under the innovation category.

The nomination is for my work as part of a team at The Guardian looking into a network of UK-based Facebook groups acting as radicalization engines for far-right rhetoric . We traced the footprints of individuals who were charged with online crimes during the anti-immigration and far-right riots that took place in summer 2024 in the UK, and we found a whole ecosystem of groups they were part of.

The members, behaviour and discussions were similar across all these groups, and they reached hundreds of thousands of members. We analysed the posts to see what kind of content was shared there, and we found things like deep institutional distrust, nativism, and racist and dehumanising language against immigrants. There were also some people calling out the racism too.

But this investigation showed these ideas leaving fringe platforms - the place that you would often expect these kind of discourse to circulate - and then be normalised in the mainstream of Facebook. And it also shows how sometimes legitimate concerns about the economy or local services can be funnelled towards scapegoats and conspiracy theories.

How did your experience at Cambridge shape this work?

Before coming to Cambridge, I was a journalist for a decade in Brazil, using data to find stories or applying artificial intelligence in a news context. But changes in this area started to feel too intense and too fast to keep track of.

There was a lot of hype around AI, and a push to use it in journalism, and lots of uncertainty regarding how to apply it. There were huge questions not only about how or what we can do with AI, but how and how to do that responsibly, most importantly.

So, I came to Cambridge to study an MPhil at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence with those questions in mind. In my first research project there, I analysed the applicability of large language models, using it in a specific data labelling task. I looked at whether we can trust the classifications and categories that these LLMs produce for us. One of the main applications for LLMs in news reporting today is this kind of data labelling. It's something that is far from glamorous. But it's useful.

And that's precisely the knowledge I needed for that Guardian story. We analysed thousands of social media posts to classify their rhetoric into those different categories. And the training here in Cambridge helped me design the tests to know.

Even though this project was done in journalism, there is a very clear dotted line to academic work, and I also learned how to do social network analysis at the Cambridge University's research methods program. Then this was applied to study how these people and groups connected.

What's been your experience of going from journalism to academia?

A huge gamble, but to be honest, I don't feel like I've actually left journalism.

There is an incredible overlap between the two lines of work. For example, my reporting was often connected to academic subjects and to researchers, so it feels like I'm orbiting a space which I was already involved with. And naturally, there is a lot of writing in both of these worlds.

I still feel very much connected to journalism and I plan to continue to be so, perhaps in some sort of hybrid career path in the future. Research now is completely connected to journalism and I continue to engage with industry.

But I do get a bit starstruck every now and then, working with people that I admired for many years, which is incredible.

What does being nominated for this award mean to you?

This is one of the proudest moments in my career. It's a great honour in itself, but I guess the main thing for me is the nomination shows that my bet of coming here paid off!

I feel honoured that there are other people who see value in what I'm doing. We often do these things in some sort of isolation, or it can feel hard to know if you're going in the right direction or not. This is a very important stamp to show me that something is working.

In terms of impact, my main goal has always been understanding how technology changes our lives and helping explain that to people. Because there are many impacts in this tech world that stay hidden. The power dynamics around them with big tech companies can be really hard to track. I believe that understanding these dynamics and how AI impacts our day-to-day lives can help us hold those power to account.

What's next for you, Raphael?

I continue to work on many projects in the university around technology, big tech platforms and how those shape the information environment and journalism.

I was recently part of a team of researchers here in Cambridge and at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who analysed the quantity and quality of data that tech firms make available for researchers, showing a very concerning lack of transparency in these platforms.

My main line of work now is my PhD research at Cambridge Digital Humanities, where I'm supported by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship . I'm looking into how conversational search - people going to chat bots to find information instead of traditional search engines - can impact how we access information, and the quality and the transparency of it, and how we consume news. It's still early days in that research, so I don't have many results to show yet. But you can follow me on LinkedIn , Instagram and Bluesky .