Laura Kurek | University of Michigan

About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate advised by Ceren Budak and Eric Gilbert at the University of Michigan in the School of Information. I research information manipulation on the internet using both quantitative and qualitative methods. I work with data from social media platforms (X/Twitter, Rumble, Telegram) as well as peer-production knowledge sites (Wikipedia).

Prior to starting my Ph.D., I worked in industry for several years as a data science specialist at Accenture Federal Services. In 2017, I spent a year in the Ural Mountains on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Research interests: Social computing, computational social science

Education

Ph.D. in Information, School of Information, University of Michigan, 2027 (expected)
B.S. in Science, Technology, & International Affairs, Georgetown University, 2016

Updates

October 2025: At CSCW ‘25, I am co-organizing a workshop and presenting a paper!
August 2025: Poster presentation at PolNet-PaCSS ‘25
July 2025: Poster presentation at IC2S2 ‘25
Dec 2024: Our paper Wikipedia in Wartime was accepted into CSCW ‘25
Oct 2024: Succesfully defended the field preliminary milestone, advanced to candidacy
June-Aug 2024: Tech policy internship at the Center for Democracy and Technology
May 2024: Workshop paper accepted to Wiki Workshop ‘24, Knowledge Integrity track
April 2024: Workshop paper accepted to ICWSM ‘24, Digital Disinfo workshop
February 2024: Succesfully defended the pre-candancy milestone

Earlier updates

October 2023: Attended CSCW '23 in Minneapolis
July 2023: Attended ACL '23 in Toronto
May 2023: Pre-candidacy paper proposal approved
August 2022: Started a Ph.D. in Information at the University of Michigan

Publications

Wikipedia in Wartime: Experiences of Wikipedians Maintaining Articles About the Russia-Ukraine War

Laura Kurek, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2025)

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Outsourcing an Information Operation: A Complete Dataset of Tenet Media's Podcasts on Rumble

Laura Kurek, Eric Gilbert, Ceren Budak

arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.19802

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Follow Nudges without Budges: A Field Experiment on Misinformation Followers Didn’t Change Follow Networks

Laura Kurek, Joshua Ashkinaze, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert

arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.13643

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Seeing Like an AI: How LLMs Apply (and Misapply) Wikipedia Neutrality Norms

Joshua Ashkinaze, Ruijia Guan, Laura Kurek, Eytan Adar, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2026)

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Other writings:

Kurek, L., Harper, T., Bhatia, A., & Marechal, N. (2024). Rules of the Road: Political Advertising on Social Media in the 2024 U.S. Election. Center for Democracy & Technology.