Prof. Nishanth Sastry, Computer Science.

Prof. Nishanth Sastry has been working with the UK Parliament on digital citizen engagement. Working with the Director of Research at the House of Commons Library, Prof. Sastry and his student have identified patterns in how MPs and citizens talk to each other online on Twitter. Interestingly, they find a pattern of significant cross-party interactions (fig 1), whereby supporters of one party (say Labour or SNP) may talk directly with MPs of another party (say the Conservative Party). They also identify statistically significant differences in the tone of speech, and direct engagement on an equal setting on a platform such as Twitter appears to offer citizens a means to express their anxiety, anger or other negative emotions to MPs. In contrast, MPs respond with more positive emotions, to answer the citizens. (fig 2; LIWC)

As part of a project called “Tracking the trackers”, Prof. Nishanth Sastry and his student have developed a Chrome Extension which looks at the Web tracking ecosystem. It is currently being used by thousands of users across the world, of whom 1,350 users from 85 countries are sharing data with the research team, making it the largest in-the-wild study of web tracking across the world. Results from this project indicate for example that GDPR does not seem to significantly decrease the level of tracking, likely because of users choosing the default privacy options offered by websites. The team also finds that users in countries such as the UK are worse off than countries such as China, because the ads and tracking ecosystem in Western countries is more consolidated with more powerful players, who are, ironically, blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Interested users can install the Chrome plugin here and check the interconnectedness and privacy leaks of their own browsing histories. 

Prof. Nishanth Sastry, Computer Science, Distributed and Networked Systems Group.