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

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

arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.04183

PDF

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.