Bertie Vidgen is a post-doctoral researcher within the Alan Turing Institute’s public policy programme and a Research Associate at the OII. His main research focuses on detecting, analysing, and countering online hate speech, examining it in the context of both news and social media. He primarily uses computational social science methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and statistical modelling.
Before he joined the Turing, Bertie studied for a DPhil at the OII, where he researched Islamophobic hate speech among followers of UK political parties on Twitter. He is particularly interested in understanding how Islamophobia manifests across the political spectrum (including both mainstream and far right parties) as well as its temporal dynamics. He is actively interested in the use of computational methods in social science, the ethical challenges of using social media data, and the role of social media within politics. He holds a BA from the University of Warwick in History and Politics and an MA from the University of Essex in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. Bertie’s other work includes consulting, advising, and teaching.
Islamophobia, online politics, computational social science, machine learning.
With Bertram Vidgen
Bertie Vidgen argues that current definitions of extremism are severely limited. They are posed as certainties rather than probabilities, and this makes them incapable of capturing the complexity of social reality.
23 April 2024
Personalisation has the potential to democratise who decides how LLMs behave, but comes with risks for individuals and society, say Oxford researchers.
11 February 2022
We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2021 OII MSc Thesis Prizes. Two prizes were awarded for the best theses from the MSc in Social Data Science and the MSc in Social Science of the Internet, plus four ‘Highly Commended' awards.
13 August 2021
AI content moderation systems have the potential to relieve the burden of tackling online hate. But the use of emojis to express hate can outpace what AI systems can understand.
10 February 2021
