Zachary Novack
Advisor: Simon DeDeo
Major: Statistics and Machine Learning
Minor: Sonic Arts
Inferring Radicalization: How Machine Learning can Reveal the Sources and Causes of Extremist Ideology
How do online social worlds alter the trajectories of political extremists? Our modern marketing economy is increasingly oriented around the use of the internet to “A/B test” messages for virality and reach, but we have no idea how these same methods emerge, in a decentralized fashion, to A/B test conspiracy theories and extremist ideology. The present research seeks to address this gap by applying the framework of cultural evolution to a 3.5-year dataset of one of the most notorious extremist sites, known as 4chan, in order to both reconstruct the underlying conceptual structure of the site user’s political viewpoints, and to study how users dynamically adjust and adapt their posts on the basis of the responses they receive from others online. This study has larger academic implications, as 4chan’s role in spreading extremism to other websites will allow us to extrapolate conclusions made here to the wider community looking at online radicalization as a whole.
Bio
Zachary is broadly passionate about the application of statistics and machine learning theory to real societal issues that affect the social, environmental, and policy spheres within the modern world. Thus, he is currently researching how extremism forms and propagates in online fringe communities, and plans to pursue a doctorate in Statistics after CMU. In his free time, Zachary enjoys cooking, baking, hiking, and writing music!