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Dr Gabriel Brito

Former Visiting Fellow
Gabriel Brito

Dr Gabriel Brito

Former Visiting Fellow

Profile Contents

About

Gabriel Brito is a digital anthropologist with extensive experience in social media analytics across the private and public sectors. As Co-founder and Executive Director of Deepsocial, he bridges social science and data analytics to explore how digital platforms shape political and cultural life. He has advised politicians and policymakers on navigating online ecosystems responsibly and ethically.

His research focuses on the sociocultural implications of social media algorithms in the Latin American context, particularly how they influence public discourse and social inequality. Gabriel holds a BA (Hons) in Anthropology and in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Melbourne. He is a professor at Casa Grande University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, founder of the Ayawana Foundation, and a Research Fellow at the ESRC Digital Good Network.

As a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Gabriel explores digital gang culture—how marginalized communities use social media to construct identity, express power, and navigate algorithmic visibility in contexts of violence and exclusion. Professor Brito collaborates with Dr Scott Hale to develop a mixed-methods approach that combines deep ethnographic inquiry with large language models (LLMs). This hybrid methodology connects thick cultural description with scalable computational analysis, offering new insights into digital gang cultures and broader patterns of online behavior.

Research Interests

Digital ethnography, digital democracy, digital violence and polarisation, algorithmic inequality, attention economy, digital narcoculture.

Positions at the OII

  • Visiting Fellow, March 2025 - September 2025
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