I am Lily Harkes, a first-year Ph.D student in the Communication Department at UCLA. My research explores the digital information ecosystem and focuses on improving online safety. I am particularly interested in how platform infrastructure (technical features, content formats, algorithms) as well as persuasive narratives employed by users shape what content becomes most visible and feels most convincing. I primarily rely on computational methods, particularly natural language processing and machine learning, to study communication patterns at scale.
