Camille François MIA '13

Camille François

Associate Professor of Practice of International and Public Affairs


Personal Details

Camille François specializes in how organized actors use digital technologies to harm society and individuals. Her work to understand and mitigate digital harms spans from cyber conflict to online harassment. 

She has advised governments and parliamentary committees on both sides of the Atlantic—from investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee, to leading the French government’s recent inquiry into the economic opportunities and social challenges presented by the metaverse. 

She currently serves as the Senior Director for Trust & Safety at Niantic, a pioneering augmented reality and gaming company. She was previously Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika, a cybersecurity company focused on detecting disinformation networks, where she oversaw its Investigation, Analysis, Product and R&D teams. Under her leadership, Graphika helped clients such as Facebook, Google or Pinterest tackle information harms and was recognized by Fast Company as being the 10th most innovative company in the world, and the first in the security industry.

Camille has developed and implemented a number of methodological innovations in the field of Trust & Safety. During her time as Principal Researcher at Google, she led a new approach to countering violent extremism online. She is the author of the “Actor-Behavior-Content framework” which influenced how major platforms approach online content moderation, and was among the first to document the phenomenon of government-backed networked harassment (“patriotic trolling”). At the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), she co-led the development of bug bounties for algorithmic harms.

Camille serves on the adjunct faculty of the Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She is an affiliate scholar of the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, a PhD candidate at the French Institute of Geopolitics, a Fulbright scholar and a Young Leader of the French-American Foundation. She holds a Masters in Human Rights from the French Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences-Po) and a Masters in International Security from Columbia University. 

In 2019, Camille was distinguished by the MIT Tech Review in the "35 Innovators Under 35" annual award in the "Visionary" category for her work leveraging data science to detect and analyze deceptive campaigns at scale. She was also distinguished by TIME magazine as one of the 100 next most influential people in the world, for her work on Trust & Safety. 

She lives and works in New York.