Kevin Zheng

[email protected] • LinkedIn

Research interests: social media and social computing, internet studies, mixed-methods research, digital platforms and infrastructures, computational social science, on- and offline communities

Education

PhD in Information

University of Michigan • School of Information

Aug 2024 - present

GPA: 4.0/4
Advisors: Eric Gilbert (Professor of Information) and Christian Sandvig (Professor of Digital Media)

BS in Computer Engineering • BA in Science, Technology, and Society

University of Massachusetts Amherst • College of Engineering and Bachelor's Degree with Individual Concentration

Sep 2018 - May 2022

GPA: 3.95/4 (summa cum laude, Commonwealth Honors College Scholar with Greatest Distinction)
Honors Thesis: Language Classification and Transcription of a Massive Online Video Corpus Towards Measuring the Prevalence of Online Hate Speech
- Supervisor: Ethan Zuckerman (Associate Professor of Public Policy, Information, and Communication)

Publications and Presentations

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, and Ethan Zuckerman. 2025. One Platform, Four Languages: Comparing English, Spanish, Hindi, and Russian YouTube. Social Media + Society 11(3), (August 2025). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251363216

Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, Rebecca Curran, Jason Baumgartner, and Ethan Zuckerman. 2023. Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 3, (December 2023). https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2023.022

Conference Presentations

Non-Archival

Lavinia Dunagan, Kevin Zheng, Christian Sandvig, and Eric Gilbert. 2025. (Promises of) Platform Permanence: How People Die on Legacy.com. In 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S): Reverberations, September 2025. Seattle, WA, USA.

Kevin Zheng, Ryan McGrady, and Ethan Zuckerman. 2024. TubeStats: A Dashboard for YouTube Metrics. In International Conference on Computational Social Science, July 2024. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, and Ethan Zuckerman. 2024. One Platform, Four Languages: A Method to Compare Languages on YouTube. In International Conference on Computational Social Science, July 2024. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Workshops

Organizer

AI Skeptics @ U-M Working Group. November 2024. “AI” is not Inevitable: a workshop for AI skeptics at U-M. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Presenter

Kevin Zheng, Linda Huber, Aaron Stark, Nathan Kim, Francesca Lameiro, Wells Lucas Santo, Shreya Chowdhary, Eugene Kim, and Justine Zhang. April 2025. Resisting AI Solutionism within the University through Workplace Collective Action. In Resisting AI Solutionism: Where do we go from here?, 2025. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08313

Kevin Zheng. Methods for Contextualizing the Prevalence and Reach of Online Harms. In Public Interest Social Media Solutions Workshop, July 2024. Applied Social Media Lab, Institute for Rebooting Social Media, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Participant

What is Work Worth? Exploring What Generative AI Means for Workers’ Lives and Labor. May 2025. Data & Society.

Public Scholarship

Ryan McGrady, Ethan Zuckerman, and Kevin Zheng. AI Companies Threaten Independent Social Media Research. Tech Policy Press, January 30 2025.

Research Experience

School of Information, University of Michigan

Supervisors: Eric Gilbert (Professor of Information) and Christian Sandvig (Professor of Digital Media)

PhD Student • Aug 2024 - Present

Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Principal investigator: Ethan Zuckerman (Associate Professor of Information, Public Policy, and Communication)

Research Affiliate • Sep 2024 - Present

Research Fellow and Community Manager • Aug 2022 - Aug 2024

Undergraduate Researcher • Sep 2021 - May 2022

Media Cloud • Media Ecosystems Analysis Group

Principal investigators: Ethan Zuckerman (Founder, UMass Amherst), Fernando Bermejo (Project Director, Media Ecosystems Analysis Group), Rahul Bhargava (Technical Lead, Northeastern University)

Research Affiliate • Sep 2024 - Present

Researcher, International Hate Observatory Project • Sep 2021 - Aug 2024

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau • Center for Information Technology Policy

Washington, DC / Princeton, NJ

Supervisor: Erie Meyer (Chief Technologist and Senior Advisor to the Director)

Public Interest Technology Fellow, Office of the Chief Technologist • May 2022 - Aug 2022

Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Principal investigator: Burcu Baykurt (Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Communication)

Research Assistant, “Urban Data Analytics” project • Sep 2021 - May 2022

Institute for Applied Life Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Supervisor: Jeremy Gummeson (Research Staff, Mobile Health Sensing and Analytics Core Facility)

Core Summer Intern (Research Experience for Undergraduates) • May 2019 - Aug 2019

Awards and Scholarships

2025

UMSI PhD Conference Travel Grant • School of Information, University of Michigan

Rackham Conference Travel Grant • Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan

2024

UMSI Merit Fellowship • School of Information, University of Michigan

Full stipend and tuition support for first year of PhD program

2021

William F. Field Alumni Scholar Award • UMass Amherst Alumni Association

Named by Electrical and Computer Engineering department faculty and College of Engineering Dean as the most academically distinguished student in the class of 2022

Massachusetts High Demand Scholarship • Massachusetts Department of Higher Education

2018

John and Abigail Adams Scholarship • Massachusetts Department of Higher Education

Dean's List • University of Massachusetts Amherst (all semesters)

Intern, Informal Engineering and Computer Science Learning • May 2017 - Aug 2017

Volunteer, Tech Studio • May 2016 - Aug 2016

Commonwealth Honors College, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Amherst, MA

Peer Ambassador Coordinator, Student Recruitment • Aug 2021 - May 2022

Peer Ambassador, Student Recruitment • Aug 2019 - Aug 2021

Media Coverage

Articles

Ryan McGrady. How language is hiding the real internet from you . BBC Future, August 13 2025.
Thomas Germain. How a computer that 'drunk dials' online videos is exposing what YouTube is really like. BBC Future, February 13 2025.
Jiselle Lee. YouTube is full of old, unseen home videos. Now you can watch them at random. The Washington Post, November 29 2024.
- Noor Hindi. Sandvig: People are searching for authenticity on social media. University of Michigan School of Information, December 9 2024.
Ryan McGrady and Ethan Zuckerman. AI companies train language models on YouTube’s archive − making family-and-friends videos a privacy risk. The Conversation, June 27 2024.
Philip Bump. Here’s how much a YouTube newspaper would weigh, Justice Alito. The Washington Post, February 27 2024.
Ryan McGrady. What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube.’ The Atlantic, January 26 2024.

Videos/Podcasts

DarkViperAU. Researchers Examined ALL of YouTube – The Results Are Staggering! October 3 2024.
Mike Sugarman and Ethan Zuckerman. 97. There are 14 billion videos on YouTube. Mr. Beast, we hereby challenge you to watch them all. Reimagining the Internet, January 31 2024.
Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau. This Week in Google 753. This Week in Tech, January 31 2024.