Megan Squire  Megan Squire is a professor in computer science at Elon University who studies online extremism. Squire grew up in a conservative, Christian household near Virginia Beach, Virginia. She attended the College of William & Mary for her double major in art history and public policy. She then took a secretarial job at an antivirus company after becoming interested in computers. She received a PhD at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, and then moved to North Carolina for a brief job at a startup. Squire then began teaching at Elon University. Squire researches how online extremism is mediated by social media networks, including Telegram, Facebook, and other platforms. Squire performed research in 2018 on anti-Muslim Facebook groups, using Facebook's Graph API to create a dataset of 700,000 members from 1870 open and closed groups with ideologies ranging from anti-Muslim to white nationalist to neo-Confederate, and more. The data was gathered over ten months. She found that membership in one such group correlated highly with the chance of being in another sort of group, indicating that anti-Muslim sentiment acted as a "common denominator" for membership in related groups. Squire first engaged in activism at age 15, when she joined her school environmental club to protest pollution at an industrial cattle farm. While teaching at Elon, she protested the war in Iraq. In 2008, Squire campaigned for the future US President Obama. However, following Obama's handling of the Great Recession, Squire became disillusioned with electoral politics and began engaging with the Occupy movement. Amid a rise in fascist and neo-Nazi pamphleting of college campuses, Squire put together an interactive map of such events. By 14 November 2017, she had documented over 200 such occurrences.