About

Stefan Baack is a sociotechnical researcher specializing in AI governance, data practices, and the relationship between technology and democratic knowledge communities. His research examines how the development and evaluation of AI systems are shaped by the interests and values of those who build them, and how open alternatives can better serve the public interest.

At the Mozilla Foundation, where he worked as a senior researcher for seven years, he studied AI training data governance and the curation of large-scale web archives like Common Crawl. His work was cited by the US Copyright Office and covered in The Atlantic, WIRED, and the Washington Post. He also supported Mozilla’s campaigns and policy work, as well as the Internet Health Report and the IRL podcast.

Before Mozilla, he completed a PhD at the University of Groningen, been a fellow at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and an associate researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute.

He employs qualitative methods (interviews, discourse analysis) and Digital Methods (web scraping, network analysis, data analysis in Python). His research has been present conferences like FAccT and published in journals such as Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, and Digital Journalism.