
Yin is fascinated by the intersection between language and technology. She researches persuasion in the context of new media, focusing specifically on the rhetoric and resonance of Brexit tweets.
Yin Yin Lu
Former DPhil Student
Profile
Yin Yin Lu graduated from the DPhil in Information, Communication & the Social Sciences in 2019.
Yin is fascinated by the intersection between language and technology. She researches persuasion in the context of new media, focusing specifically on the rhetoric and resonance of Brexit tweets. Her multi-strategy design encompasses qualitative text analysis, multivariate regressions, outlier detection and analysis, semi-structured trace interviews, supervised machine learning algorithms, and natural language processing. What makes a political message resonate with its audience on social media? How can the message be expressed and delivered most effectively? What strategies do individuals and organisations use when they send a political tweet and why?
Prior to joining the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and Balliol College, Yin obtained a Masters in English Language from the University of Oxford (Lincoln College) in 2014 and a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University (magna cum laude) in 2012, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Between these degrees, she worked at Pearson’s Higher Education division and 10 Speed Labs, a digital media agency in Manhattan. While at Columbia, she was a research annotator at the Centre for Computational Learning Systems and the editor in chief of Inside New York 2011, a nationally-published guidebook to New York City.
Yin has been very active at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is currently the teaching assistant for the Natural Language Processing option course for the MSc in Social Data Science and the Accessing Research Data from the Social Web option course for the MSc in Social Science of the Internet. She was a lead organiser of the Connected Life 2015 conference, the teaching assistant for the Statistics Core requirement for all MSc and DPhil students, and a DPhil Student Representative on the Graduate Studies Committee. She has also been involved with three research projects with OII faculty, one of which was based at the Alan Turing Institute. In spring 2018, she visited the Information Visualisation and Visual Analytics unit of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD under an EU SoBigData grant to develop and visualise natural language processing approaches to her dataset of 26 million Brexit tweets.
Outside of the OII, Yin has served as the Senior Community Warden at the Student Union, a tutor for the Seminar for Advanced English Studies, a city tour guide, and a digital consultant. She has sung both soprano and alto for Balliol, Wadham, Christ Church, and Pembroke College chapel choirs. A Clarendon Scholar, Yin served on the Clarendon Council in 2015 and was editor in chief of the Clarendon Chronicle. In March 2016 and 2017, she helped deliver empowerment programmes at six different secondary schools across Japan. At Balliol, she was a Peer Supporter and served as a Warden of the Jowett Walk complex. She was also a member of the 2016-2017 Oxford Global Leadership Initiative learning community.
Yin defines herself as a creator, communicator, and connector. She is the founder and co-convenor of the #SocialHumanities network at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). Previously, her passion for networking and event management led her to launch the Lexicography Society at Columbia and an English Language Seminar at Lincoln College. She also created a video series for the Lexicography Society, What’s Your Word? Yin’s eclectic interests span experimental writing, startups and entrepreneurship, piano, singing, SEO/SEM, transcontinental cooking, bread baking, mixology, travel, learning languages, hiking, photography, and video production. Her ultimate objective is to reinvent the novel—along with the very acts of reading and writing—through new media technologies.
Yin is grateful to the Oxford University Press Clarendon Fund and Santander for full funding support.
Research interests
social media, online communication, natural language processing, interactive visualisation, discourse analysis, digital rhetoric, sociology of culture, pragmatics, social tagging, Internet linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, big data, digital marketing, search engine optimisation, sentiment analysis, social network analysis, media studies
Positions held at the OII
- DPhil Candidate, October 2014 –
Supervisors at the OII
Research
Past projects
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Data Financing for Global Good: A Feasibility Study
Participants: Professor Vili Lehdonvirta, Dr Brent Mittelstadt, Dr Greg Taylor, Yin Yin Lu, Artem Kadikov, Professor Helen Margetts
This project, and the resulting report, provides a first step in the assessment of data financing as a mechanism for social good in the data economy.
Online articles
- SoBigData: NLP Approaches to Rhetoric and Resonance in Brexit Tweets
- Clarin: Digital Youth in East Asia Fall Methods Workshop: How to Analyse Large Volumes of Online Text
- Clarin: NLP Meets K-Pop at the Meertens Instituut
- Rowman & Littlefield: #NeverHillary vs #NeverTrump
- Oxford University: What Hashtags Reveal About the EU Debate
- Sound and Furry in #EURef Twitter War
- Green Templeton College: Living by Numbers – Big Data & Society
- Philological Society: Natural Language Processing meets social media corpora
Reports
- Data Financing for Global Good: A Fesaibility Study
- Consumer Protection in Turkey: Law, Informality and the Role of the Media
Reviews
Videos
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Russian Tweets on Brexit
Recorded: 14 November 2017
Duration: 00:03:26
A detailed analysis of Twitter accounts identified by the US senate as being linked to the Kremlin shows this activity before, during and after the Brexit vote in 2016.
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Language and Empowerment
Recorded: 19 January 2017
Duration: 00:10:09
Yin Yin Lu, DPhil Candidate at Balliol College, University of Oxford speaks on Language and Empowerment at the UK launch of T-Talks. She shares some of her PhD research on Brexit hashtags and expresses her love and language and words.
Press
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#Deleteuber Twitter campaign takes hold in Saudi Arabia
22 October 2018 The Telegraph
Uber has been hit by a online boycott in Saudi Arabia after the taxi hailing app pulled out of a conference in response to the alleged murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
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Russian Twitter bots: Menace to democracy – or overhyped distraction?
4 May 2018 The Telegraph
Recent research suggested that over 6,500 Twitter bots originating in Russia tweeted support for Labour in last year’s general election, in an effort to get Jeremy Corbyn’s party elected.
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Malaysian ‘Fake News’ Law Targets Government Critics
2 May 2018 The Takeaway
While there is a genuine interest in removing misleading content, there is also concern about potential abuse and threats to free speech when governments create laws against misinformation online.
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Fake news laws are threatening free speech on a global scale
5 April 2018 Wired
People spreading fake news in Malaysia could be sentenced to six years in jail under a new law. India, the UK, and France are among other countries planning laws for misinformation.
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The distorted online networks of Mexico’s election campaign
22 March 2018 El País
Extensive use of trolls, bots and fake news in a country with high social media penetration is distorting the political debate ahead of the July 1 vote
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You don’t need to be rich (or Russian) to subvert UK democracy
3 March 2018 Wired
“We’re dealing with a problem that is even bigger than the platforms. It’s a problem with communication in the 21st century.”
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Facebook to tell users if they interacted with Russia’s ‘troll army’
23 November 2017 The Guardian
Social network says tool will let users see if they have liked or followed accounts created by organisation that carries out misinformation operations
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Russian ‘troll army’ tweets cited more than 80 times in UK media
20 November 2017 The Guardian
Posts from accounts said by Twitter to be Russian trolls quoted in coverage ranging from breaking news to humorous listicles
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Facebook ‘must share information’ on Russian interference in UK
16 November 2017 The Guardian
Social network is urged to reveal what it knows as expert says it is unlikely Russian professional trolls only used Twitter
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Fact Check: Here’s what we know about alleged Russian involvement in Brexit
16 November 2017 Channel 4
Researcher Yin Yin Lu told Sky News that she had found 416 tweets from the Russian accounts from March to July 2016 (i.e. the months preceding the EU referendum).
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Russian troll factories: researchers damn Twitter’s refusal to share data
15 November 2017 The Guardian
Estimated number of Russian state-sponsored accounts on Twitter and Facebook vary wildly between 50 and 150,000
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Fake Twitter accounts targeting EU referendum ‘co-ordinated by Russia’
14 November 2017 Sky News
An expert says posters linked to the Kremlin made a determined effort to interfere with the result of the Brexit vote in 2016.
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May attacks Russia over propaganda war
14 November 2017 The Times
Moscow uses fake news to undermine democracy, says prime minister
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Britain’s May slams Russia for election meddling and fake news (unlike President Trump)
14 November 2017 The Washington Post
Yin Yin Lu of the Oxford Internet Institute told the Times of London that 54 accounts on a list of 2,752 linked by Twitter to the Internet Research Agency tweeted about “Brexit,” Britain’s planned exit from the European Union.