Dr. Abby Fanlo is a policy researcher with expertise at the intersection of political conflict, technology, and the information ecosystem.

At Meta, Abby was a Content Policy Manager, where she helped develop Meta’s policies on algorithmic ranking, Search, conflict related misinformation, and COVID misinformation. She was previously a Research Associate and Adjunct Researcher at the RAND Corporation, where she has contributed to projects on the future of Sunni terrorism, Russian propaganda, and homeland security.

Abby’s PhD research at Stanford focused on two related questions. First, her dissertation investigated how the end of asymmetric security partnerships affected international conflict between adversaries. Specifically, she asked: When great powers withdraw security commitments and assistance from weaker partners, how will the adversaries of those partners react? Second, in other work, she investigated the various methods states use to pursue international rivalries offensively, including arming rebels, building nuclear arsenals, and deploying rhetorical strategies to justify military interventions.

She was a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, an Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Fellow and Mentor, and a Junior Scholar at the Carnegie International Policy Scholar Consortium and Network (IPSCON). Her research was funded by the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and the Freeman Spogli Institute. 

She also co-founded Female Academics in Foreign Policy (FAFP), an interdisciplinary working group on U.S. foreign policy supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education at Stanford.