Anneke Buffone
Founder, CLARA
Dr. Anneke Buffone is the Founder and CEO of CLARA Standards, a nonprofit building independent safety evaluation infrastructure for youth-facing social media and messaging platforms, AI chatbots, and games. She spent nearly seven years at Meta, where her research spanned problematic use, Feed ranking and recommendations, and—in her final two years—cross-platform age assurance across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads. She is a Senior Practitioner Fellow at USC’s Neely Center and a Research Affiliate working with Stanford’s Social Media Lab. Before working as a UX researcher at Meta, Anneke completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Penn’s World Well-Being Project under Martin Seligman, PhD and Lyle Ungar, PhD, a computational social science working group combining Facebook and Twitter behavioral data with surveys to study well-being, stress, and empathy. Her work focuses on youth online safety and platform accountability, via academic research collaborations, advising lawmakers, and educational outreach on social media harms with schools. She holds a PhD in social psychology.