WED@NICO SEMINAR: Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh "How Unequal Participation Sustains Online Hate"

Speaker:

Yu-Ru Lin, Professor, School of Computing and Information, and Research Director of the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security (Pitt Cyber), University of Pittsburgh

Title:

How Unequal Participation Sustains Online Hate

Abstract: 

Traditional extremist organizations were often hierarchical, with disciplined and centralized messaging. By contrast, online hate communities operate through looser, attention-driven networks in which many actors participate and messages constantly shift. How, then, do they sustain engagement and remain resilient? This talk shows that participation structure shapes narrative amplification differently across ideologies: centralized Islamophobic and anti-Semitic networks follow distinct pathways of message circulation. The findings shed light on why some online hate communities are harder to disrupt and point to more evidence-based approaches to reducing their impact.

Speaker Bio:

Yu-Ru Lin is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information and the Research Director of the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security (Pitt Cyber) at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the PITT Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB). Her research is situated at the intersection of computational social science, network science, and data science, focusing on the modeling and inference of social behavior, trust, influence, and risk in large-scale socio-technical and human–AI systems. Methodologically, her work integrates network modeling, high-dimensional representation learning, and mixed-methods analysis of social media, anonymized mobility data, and survey instruments. She investigates the dynamic co-evolution of social networks, media ecosystems, and algorithmic curation—examining feedback loops, amplification, and manipulation alongside collective responses to social, political, and environmental shocks. Her work has appeared in prestigious scientific venues and has been featured in the press, including WSJ, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, MIT News, and NPR. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 refereed journal and conference papers and served on more than 50 conference program committees in the areas of big data, network science, and computational social science. She has served as a chair/co-chair of leading computational social science, web mining, and social media conferences such as AAAI ICWSM and TheWebConference/WWW (Web & Society Research Track), as well as an Editor-in-Chief of AAAI ICWSM. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for multiple journals, including PLOS ONE,  Springer EPJ Data Science, Nature's Scientific Reports, and Frontiers in Big Data. She was selected as a Fellow of Kavli Frontiers of Science, National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and was named to SAGE journal's list of ``39 Women Doing Amazing Research in Computational Social Science'' in 2019. She has been recognized as the AI 2000 "Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Visualization" for her outstanding contributions to the field over the last decade (2014--2023 and 2009--2019).

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95284155825

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

Cost: Free

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