Lily’s dissertation project was recognised as the “Best Cyber Security Project” 2025-26 by the School of Computing, University of Kent. The project, entitled “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Decentralised Moderation: A Stream-based Risk Assessment of Severe Online Abuse on Social Media”, was supervised by Dr Virginia Franqueira. We want to congratulate Lily for this remarkable achievement!
This is what Lily had to say:
Could you tell us about your experiences studying at Kent?
My experience at the university has been extremely diverse and deeply rewarding. The atmosphere at Kent is completely unique and incredibly welcoming. There is a notably strong sense of community that you feel from day one and I was constantly surrounded by peers from all over the world. That international environment really broadened my perspective and gave me a support network that made my time here unforgettable. The balance between rigorous academics and genuinely approachable lecturers meant I always felt encouraged to speak up in seminars and push my own boundaries.
Could you tell us about your winning final project?
My final project addressed a critical gap in digital regulation: while laws like the UK Online Safety Act require social media platforms to protect users from growing online toxicity, independent regulators currently lack the technical tools to verify whether platforms are actually complying. To bridge this gap, I developed a scalable, privacy-preserving auditing framework capable of monitoring platforms in real-time. At its core is a novel cost-aware triangulation method that efficiently evaluates content using multiple independent signals, reserving intensive reasoning and language models only for ambiguous cases. When I tested this architecture on a massive dataset of 32.5 million posts from Bluesky, it successfully tracked major moderation events with statistical confidence without compromising user privacy, by employing transient processing and k-anonymity to guarantee that individual users cannot be re-identified. I was able to continue refining this research after graduating, and with the mentorship of my supervisor, Virginia Franqueira, it is currently being prepared for submission to the journal ACM Transactions on the Web. Seeing how this architecture could practically enforce accountability and protect users made the rigorous technical work incredibly fulfilling.
What are your plans for the future?
Looking ahead, I plan to continue developing my career within the Civil Service. My current role actually grew directly out of an industrial placement I completed during my studies, and I would strongly encourage any current students to pursue a placement if they have the chance; it is an invaluable way to bridge the gap between academia and industry while getting your foot in the door. Alongside my day-to-day work, I am committed to continuing the outreach surrounding my dissertation research. A key next step for me is to open-source the safety auditing framework I developed, making it freely accessible so that other researchers, developers, and independent regulators can build upon it to further the push for safer, more accountable digital spaces.