About

Damon McCoy is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and serves as Co-Director of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research focuses on empirically measuring the security and privacy of technology systems and their intersections with society. His primary areas of interest include online payment systems, the economics of cybercrime, automotive systems, privacy-enhancing technologies, and censorship resistance. McCoy is involved in research projects that analyze online threats, misinformation, and the impact of digital platforms on democracy. Notably, he has contributed to studies examining online harassment targeting election officials, the monetization of conspiracy theories on platforms like YouTube, and the security of automotive embedded systems. His work aims to expose online threats, promote civil discourse, and develop methods for faster content moderation, with a focus on safeguarding democratic processes and civic life.

Research topics

• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Internet privacy
• World Wide Web
• Law
• Sociology
• Business
• Psychology
• Public relations
• Social psychology
• Criminology
• Advertising

Selected publications

• Analyzing Social Media Claims regarding Youth Online Safety Features to Identify Problem Areas and Communication Gaps CSCW005

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2026-04-30

  articleOpen access

  Social media platforms have faced increasing scrutiny over whether and how they protect youth online. While online risks to children have been well-documented by prior research, how social media platforms communicate about these risks and their efforts to improve youth safety have not been holistically examined. To fill this gap, we analyzed N = 352 press releases and safety-related blogs published between 2019 and 2024 by four platforms popular among youth: YouTube, TikTok, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and Snapchat. Leveraging both inductive and deductive qualitative approaches, we developed a comprehensive framework of seven problem areas where risks arise, and social media platforms claim to address these risks through various online safety features. Our analysis revealed uneven emphasis across problem areas, with most communications focused on Content Exposure and Interpersonal Communication, whereas less emphasis was placed on Content Creation, Data Access, and Platform Access. Additionally, we identified three problematic communication practices related to their described safety features, including discrepancies between feature implementation and availability, unclear or inconsistent explanations of safety feature operation, and a lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of safety features in mitigating risks once implemented. Based on these findings, we discuss the communication gaps between risks and the described safety features, as well as the tensions in achieving transparency in platform communication. Our analysis of platform communication informs guidelines for responsibly communicating about youth safety features.

  PublisherDOI

• “The Report Button is Just for Decoration”:

  Journal of Online Trust and Safety · 2026-05-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  For content creators, whose careers rely on digital visibility, hate and harassment are an occupational hazard that impacts creators’ mental health, and in cases where online harassment spills offline, physical safety. We interviewed 19 YouTube creators on their experiences with and strategies used to combat hate and harassment, focusing on platform-provided tools, to understand their needs and identify areas for improvement. While participants did report offensive content, they did not find the platform’s reporting feature useful and felt they could not rely on it for remediation or support. Instead, they primarily used platform-provided moderation tools, social media hygiene practices, and other creators’ influence to manage the abuse they receive. Additionally, we found that harassment extended beyond the overt abuse perpetrated by bad actors and included seemingly innocuous interactions from their audience. Creators thus had to factor both external threats and intracom-munity dynamics into their threat model. The persistence of these issues across years of research suggests that, absent changes in incentives or policy reforms, it is unlikely that platform improvements alone will meet user safety needs. We discuss how external factors contribute to these challenges or constrain solutions.

  PublisherDOI

• Majority Rules: Polarizing Content Dissemination and User Experience on TikTok

  Journal of Quantitative Description Digital Media · 2026-03-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We investigate the issue of stance representation at the platform level, and differences in experience at the individual level, in the context of two controversial, mostly two-sided issues: the legality of abortion in the U.S., and the Israel/Hamas conflict; we do so on TikTok. In manually annotated representative samples containing over 3.8k videos and spanning a combined 37 weeks, we measure the number of videos available on the platform and the views these videos receive, separated by the stance they represent (Pro Choice vs. Pro Life, and Pro Israel vs. Pro Palestine). We complement these platform-level analyses with a contemporaneous estimate of TikTok user opinions and a survey of users' content recommendation experiences. Around 34.5% of TikTok users identified as Pro Life and 53.7% as Pro Israel in Pew surveys fielded close to our topic time frames. However, at the platform level, we find that videos labeled as either Pro Life or Pro Israel are markedly underrepresented both in terms of video counts and viewership; we found only 3.2% of abortion-related videos (3.0% of views) represented a Pro Life stance, and 8.4% of Israel/Hamas-related videos (12.0% of views) represented a Pro Israel stance, respectively. Pro Choice and Pro Palestine respondents tended to be shown mostly videos in line with their opinion, users aligned with the opposing opinions were more likely to report being shown mostly videos they disagreed with, or seeing less on-topic content overall.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Caught in a Mafia Romance: How Users Explore Intimate Narratives with Chatbots

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  AI chatbots, built using large language models, are increasingly integrated into society and mimic the patterns of human text exchanges. While previous research has raised concerns that humans may form romantic attachment to chatbots, the range of AI-mediated interactions that people wish to create for themselves or others with chatbots remains poorly understood, particularly given the fast evolving landscape of chatbots. We provide an empirical study of Character.AI (cAI), a popular chatbot platform that enables users to design and share character-based bots, and synthesize this with an analysis of Reddit posts from cAI users. Contrary to popular narratives, we identify that users want to: (1) engage in intimate role-play with young adult, masculine-presenting characters that place users in a position of inferior power in well-defined scenarios and (2) immerse themselves in boundless, fantasy settings. We further find that users problematize both the excessive and insufficient sexualized content in such interactions which warrants novel digital-safety features.

  PublisherDOI

• Analyzing Social Media Claims regarding Youth Online Safety Features to Identify Problem Areas and Communication Gaps

  ArXiv.org · 2025-12-16

  preprintOpen access

  Social media platforms have faced increasing scrutiny over whether and how they protect youth online. While online risks to children have been well-documented by prior research, how social media platforms communicate about these risks and their efforts to improve youth safety have not been holistically examined. To fill this gap, we analyzed N=352 press releases and safety-related blogs published between 2019 and 2024 by four platforms popular among youth: YouTube, TikTok, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and Snapchat. Leveraging both inductive and deductive qualitative approaches, we developed a comprehensive framework of seven problem areas where risks arise, and a taxonomy of safety features that social media platforms claim address these risks. Our analysis revealed uneven emphasis across problem areas, with most communications focused on Content Exposure and Interpersonal Communication, whereas less emphasis was placed on Content Creation, Data Access, and Platform Access. Additionally, we identified three problematic communication practices related to their described safety features, including discrepancies between feature implementation and availability, unclear or inconsistent explanations of safety feature operation, and a lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of safety features in mitigating risks once implemented. Based on these findings, we discuss the communication gaps between risks and the described safety features, as well as the tensions in achieving transparency in platform communication. Our analysis of platform communication informs guidelines for responsibly communicating about youth safety features.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Partnërka in Crime: Characterizing Deceptive Affiliate Marketing Offers

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding Inequality of LLM Fact-Checking over Geographic Regions with Agent and Retrieval models

  ArXiv.org · 2025-03-28

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Fact-checking is a potentially useful application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to combat the growing dissemination of disinformation. However, the performance of LLMs varies across geographic regions. In this paper, we evaluate the factual accuracy of open and private models across a diverse set of regions and scenarios. Using a dataset containing 600 fact-checked statements balanced across six global regions we examine three experimental setups of fact-checking a statement: (1) when just the statement is available, (2) when an LLM-based agent with Wikipedia access is utilized, and (3) as a best case scenario when a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system provided with the official fact check is employed. Our findings reveal that regardless of the scenario and LLM used, including GPT-4, Claude Sonnet, and LLaMA, statements from the Global North perform substantially better than those from the Global South. Furthermore, this gap is broadened for the more realistic case of a Wikipedia agent-based system, highlighting that overly general knowledge bases have a limited ability to address region-specific nuances. These results underscore the urgent need for better dataset balancing and robust retrieval strategies to enhance LLM fact-checking capabilities, particularly in geographically diverse contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What’s in a Label? Propaganda Labels and User Sharing Behavior on Social Media Platforms

  Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · 2025-06-07

  articleOpen access

  Authentic information is vital for a society's ability to make rational decisions. Fabricated and manipulative information can be harmful to society as seen in cases of threatening events that were consequences of foreign propaganda and radical ideologies. While past research has studied dis- and misinformation on social media platforms, the study of propaganda has received much less attention. This study explores the sharing intentions of propaganda on social media platforms and develops an intervention to help detect it. In a randomized controlled trial setting, we added indicators to social media posts that used propaganda techniques to advance an agenda, including techniques that rely on fallacious reasoning, emotional rather than logical reasoning, etc. We then asked our participants (n=1,187) about their intention to engage with these posts. We found that participants were significantly (2.4 times) less likely to share these posts with indicators. We also found that participants’ political affiliation moderated their sharing intentions. We believe our findings provide valuable insights for the study of propaganda on social media platforms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measurement and Metrics for Content Moderation

  Journal of Online Trust and Safety · 2025-04-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Content moderation aims to maintain a safe and enjoyable environment for users and prevent harmful content from spreading on online content platforms. To quantify the impact of content moderation, we propose the metric of prevented dissemination. To understand the practical limitations that content moderation systems face, we conducted an empirical measurement of public posts from news providers on Facebook in English, Ukrainian, and Russian. We analyzed how quickly posts accrue engagement, finding large asymmetries of engagement over content and time, and use our measurements to build a model to predict a post’s future engagement. We also observed the timing of (rare) post removals. Using our prevented dissemination metric, we estimate that removals prevented only 24–30% of the posts’ predicted engagement. Our lens of prevented dissemination provides an outcome-based metric to judge the impact of content moderation in practice and could help builders of moderation systems prioritize content for review.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Drives Perceptions of the Political in Online Advertising?: The Source, Content, and Political Orientation

  Journal of Experimental Political Science · 2025-09-10 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract As digital platforms become a key channel for political advertising, there are continued calls for expanding regulation of digital political ads as a distinct content category. However, designing policies to meet these demands requires us first to decipher what the public perceives a “political” ad to be. In this article, we report two preregistered experiments to understand factors that drive public perceptions of what makes an ad political. We find that both advertiser-level cues and content-level cues play an independent role in shaping perceptions. To a lesser extent, participants also attribute political meaning to ads that clash with their own preferences. These patterns were replicated in a conjoint study using artificial ads and in an experiment using real-world ads drawn from the Facebook Ad Library. Our findings serve as an important benchmark for evaluating proposed definitions of political ads from policymakers and platforms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• SaTC: CORE: Small: Scalable and Meaningful Threat Intelligence Generation

  NSF · $492k · 2017–2021

• TWC: Frontier: Collaborative: Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives

  NSF · $535k · 2012–2015

• SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Safety and Security for Targets of Digital Violence

  NSF · $350k · 2019–2023

• Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Methods and Tools for Effective, Auditable, and Interpretable Online Ad Transparency

  NSF · $384k · 2022–2027

• SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: Understanding and Mitigating Adversarial Manipulation of Content Curation Algorithms

  NSF · $242k · 2018–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Vern Paxson

  University of California, Berkeley

  61 shared

• Kirill Levchenko

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  58 shared

• Sadia Afroz

  44 shared

• Rebecca S. Portnoff

  38 shared

• Greg Durrett

  37 shared

• Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

  37 shared

• Jonathan K. Kummerfeld

  37 shared

• Tobias Lauinger

  32 shared

Awards & honors

• NYU Tandon Professor Damon McCoy receives award for automoti…