Thesis Title
Detecting Algorithmic Radicalisation Trajectories (DART).

Research Description
While there is empirical evidence of people getting radicalised through online interactions, there is a lack of socio-technical research on the pathways that lead users down such “rabbit-holes”. I am interested in exploring such trajectories, bringing together cross-disciplinary expertise from algorithmic auditing to critical theory. I intend to do cross-platform, user-centric analysis to map out the topology of the algorithmic space that attracts people to misogynistic, xenophobic, and other harmful content and combine it with qualitative critical, feminist, and political theory to probe the causal relationships that lead users there. Exploring how the algorithms that design our experience on the internet can lead to radicalisation will help us identify and tackle some of the most pressing issues of the day.

Vishnu is an internet studies PhD student at DMRC, QUT, studying online radicalisation. Vishnu is also a stand up comedian.

Supervisors
Prof Dan Angus, QUT
Prof Axel Bruns, QUT
Dr Sebastian Svegaard, QUT