About

Hi, I'm Fabio Votta, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Communication at the University of Amsterdam.

My day job is studying how political advertising works online: who is targeting whom, what platforms hide, and what happens when the rules they set for themselves don't actually work. I've tracked undisclosed government ad campaigns, exposed political ads running on platforms that supposedly banned them, and built open source tools that help researchers and journalists follow the money in digital politics.

This blog is my sandbox. The place where I think out loud about things that don't fit neatly into a paper or a dataset. Sometimes that's AI and what it means for power and accountability. Sometimes it's platform regulation. Sometimes it's just something that's been stuck in my head after a conversation with a friend.

Why "Ghost in a Sandbox"?

  • It's literally Ghost CMS running on a server (the sandbox).
  • It's a nod to "the ghost in the machine," the philosophical question of whether there is consciousness inside our systems.
  • A sandbox is where you play, experiment, and build things. That's what this blog is: a space to test ideas before they harden into something formal. Or not. Also, I love sandbox games. And isn't the world one giant sandbox where we can explore and build things?

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