Current Projects

Collaborative Research Initiatives

  • Since Winter 2024, I’ve worked with the Stanford Social Media Lab to examine algorithmic behavior and user perception. Our research focuses on how content recommendation systems influence engagement, identity formation, and sociotechnical interaction across platforms.

  • I’m also working with a team of researchers from Stanford University and UC Berkeley to investigate methods for improving online discourses. Our goal is to develop strategies that promote constructive dialogue in polarized environments.

Independent and Lead-Author Work

  • I am in the final stages of writing for my piece, “When Regulation Backfires: Cultural Infrastructure and the Mass Migration from TikTok to RedNote”. This case study analyzes how the 2025 U.S. TikTok ban catalyzed a mass user migration to RedNote (Xiaohongshu), revealing overlooked policy gaps and unintended cultural consequences. Drawing on congressional records, platform analytics, and user interviews, the study critiques dominant security-based governance frameworks and argues for a model of digital policy that acknowledges platforms as cultural infrastructure.

  • I’m also developing a qualitative study that explores how users navigate and differentiate between ephemeral and fixed content (e.g., Stories vs. Posts), and how these practices reflect or shape their self-concept over time. Data is being collected through semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of adult social media users, and will be analyzed using thematic analysis.

  • I’ve also spent the last year and a half conducting a mixed-methods historical analysis of AIDS discourses on Usenet in the early 1980s. I began this project in a media history course in Winter 2024 and expanded it in a Spring 2024 social networks course, where I began to specifically investigate the impact of influential authors on community dynamics and evolution. This project has evolved to examine the role of decentralized communication infrastructures in shaping community knowledge and health practices during a crisis.

    • Through this, built a publicly available metadata scraping script for researchers working with the GoogleGroups Usenet archive.

Idea Dump

Unrefined concepts and future directions I’m actively sketching out:

  • How does the fragmentation of social media platforms—and the behaviors users exhibit across them—affect the coherence or plurality of their self-concept?

  • What happens to users’ digital identities when they transition between platforms (e.g., from Twitter to Threads, or Tumblr to TikTok)? Do new architectures encourage reinvention, or does continuity persist through portable norms and aesthetics?

  • How does the rapid spread of fictitious media (e.g., Listenbourg, Goncharov, Zepotha) affect user trust, collective memory, and the construction of cultural legitimacy in digital environments?

  • How do counterhype movements (like de-influencing, digital minimalism, and “authentic” content) replicate the absorption patterns Turner mapped in From Counterculture to Cyberculture? Can resistance exist without becoming aestheticized and commodified?

  • How does “influencer creep” reconfigure artistic production—particularly in music—by turning musicians into full-time hype generators within platform ecosystems?

  • How do users strategically curate their online environments to protect wellbeing, and should such behavior be read as healthy boundary-setting or retreat from digital public life?

  • In what ways does the blending of trauma, entertainment, politics, and hobby content within “one-feed-fits-all” platforms erode affective boundaries and foster moral exhaustion?

  • Are curated, “discourse-free” online spaces genuinely protective, or do they reinforce filter bubbles in ways that obscure solidarity and limit intellectual challenge?

  • Is the internet still best understood through Oldenburg’s “third place” or Habermas’s “public sphere”—or are new conceptual models needed to account for the algorithmic fragmentation of communal interaction?