[3] He is the author of ten books, including New Media Campaigns and The Managed Citizen, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up.
[10] Using Charles Ragin's method of "qualitative comparative analysis" Howard investigated technology diffusion and political Islam and explained trends in many countries, with the exception of Tunisia and Egypt.
He highlights the roots these developments have in propaganda but mobilizes contemporary data to argue that a host of technologies, techniques, and actors (e.g., AI bots, political activists, conspiracy theorists, national governments, and so forth) are innovating at a rapid pace.
Lie Machines extends Howard's 2014 hypothesis that political elites in democracies would soon be using algorithms over social media to manipulate public opinion, a process he called "computational propaganda."
Evidence from Russia, Myanmar, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and of course the United States, documented in Lie Machines and scholarly articles and policy reports, further substantiate this hypothesis.
As Director of the Democracy and Technology Programme at the Oxford Internet Institute, Howard has contributed to more than 130 reports[20] on computational propaganda, political communication, election interference, and the abuse of social media by politicians and foreign governments.
[21][22] Like fellow Canadian researcher Ronald Deibert of the Citizen Lab, Howard's work is often critical of authoritarian regimes and the use of technology for political manipulation.