Adam Meskouri

I train AI to research American politics and post viral content online.

Background

Adam Meskouri in a dark blazer and grey shirt, outdoors beside a stone wall

At Duke University's DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy and Harvard University's Local Politics Lab, I research digital and American politics.

I'm a Master of Public Policy candidate at Duke, and I hold a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan. In my free time, I build online communities; I'm currently focused on sports, where my personal brand has more than 100,000 followers.

Research

I train AI models to take on research questions that once required substantial manpower. My system prompts, some as long as 50 pages, have enabled commercial AI tools to perform complex content analysis and research tasks consistently, with about 99% accuracy.

I specialize in six kinds of model training:

  • Adversarial testingProbing models with deliberately misleading inputs to expose classification failures.
  • Perturbation testingMeasuring output stability when inputs are reworded, reordered or reformatted.
  • Ablation experimentsRemoving prompt components one at a time to isolate their effect on output.
  • Subgroup fairness testingComparing accuracy across subgroups to detect disparities that aggregate metrics conceal.
  • Calibration testingChecking whether a model's stated confidence matches its observed accuracy.
  • Repeat-run consistencyMeasuring agreement across independent runs of identical queries.

Research affiliations

DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, Duke University

I trained GPT-5.5 to code 3,543 cable news transcripts from 2011 to 2025, about 19 million words in all. We used it to measure how often each network attacked other news outlets on air.

Fox News
14.5
MSNBC
61
CNN
140

Minutes of programming between attacks on other outlets.

I'm now investigating the nature of those attacks: which rhetorical strategies and invocations each network relies on, and whether the networks have distinct styles. I'm the lead author of the working paper.

The working paper on SSRN Coverage in Nieman Lab

Local Politics Lab, Harvard University

With the lab, I'm building a database of American city government that covers 14 variables for 3,981 cities over 53 years. I train and test the models that do the research.

3,981 cities 53 years 14 variables
2,806,605 data points, each drawn as a dot.

Nationalization in Local Elections

Research assistance on a Harvard Kennedy School working paper.

Read the paper

In the news

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