About
I research how online political environments and influence operations shape political attitudes. My work spans political polarisation on social media in the United States, and China’s foreign-facing state media messaging and its effects on political attitudes and inter-ethnic relations in Malaysia. I combine survey experiments, econometric analysis, large language models, and qualitative interviews. Going forward, I plan to extend this agenda with a new strand of work examining political bias in the large language models increasingly used for political text analysis. Before the PhD, I worked as a Fast Stream Economist at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions.
Online Politics and Offline Polarisation
My thesis examines how online politics shapes offline polarisation. Using survey experiments, econometric analysis, large language models, and qualitative interviews, I study three cases: whether exposure to polarised social media comments affects generalised trust and political interest in the US, whether China’s foreign-facing state media shapes political attitudes and inter-ethnic relations in Malaysia, and how Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese individuals navigate questions of identity in an era of rising China. The thesis contributes to research on diaspora politics and online influence operations, with implications for policymakers seeking social cohesion in diverse societies.
Research
- Political Communication
- Disinformation and Influence Operations
- Political Polarisation
- Computational Text Analysis (LLMs)
- Ethnic Politics and Diaspora Studies
Teaching
- Graduate Teaching Assistant, MY451 Introduction to Quantitative Analysis (Masters), LSE, 2026
- Tutor, CIVICA European Week, 2024
- Graduate Teaching Assistant, GV4L9 Introductory R for Political Science (Masters), LSE, 2023
- Graduate Teaching Assistant, GV101 Introduction to Political Science (Undergraduate), LSE, 2022–2023