Camille François

Camille Francois specializes in understanding and mitigating harms emerging from digital technologies.

For the last decade, 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 2022 inquiry into the economic opportunities and social challenges presented by the metaverse.

In 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron appointed Camille to help steer a national consultative assembly (États Généraux) on Information and Society. Camille 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 the Science, Investigations, Data Analysis, Product & Consulting teams.

Prior to this, she was a Principal Researcher at Google. Camille has developed and implemented a number of methodological innovations in the field of Trust & Safety. At Google, she led a novel approach to countering violent extremist narratives 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”).

Camille serves on the faculty of the Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she teaches Trust & Safety. She is an affiliate of the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society and of the French Institute of Geopolitics at Paris 8 University, a Fulbright scholar and a Young Leader of the French-American Foundation. She holds a masters degree in Human Rights from the French Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences-Po) and a masters degree in International Security from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Camille has been recognized by the MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators under 35, and by TIME Magazine’s “100 Next” Global Leaders. Her work has been featured in media and documentaries around the world, in the New York Times, the Washington Post, WIRED, Le Monde, GLOBO, amongst others. She lives and works in New York City.