Dr Gabriel Brito
Former Visiting Research Fellow
Dr Gabriel Brito
Former Visiting Research Fellow
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.
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.
Digital ethnography, digital democracy, digital violence and polarisation, algorithmic inequality, attention economy, digital narcoculture.