Name
Sarah Cen, "Social media, its regulation, and the challenges of auditing social media platforms"
Date & Time
Thursday, October 16, 2025, 3:15 PM - 3:40 PM
Speakers
Sarah Cen, CMU "Social Media, Its Regulation, And The Challenges Of Auditing Social Media Platforms" In this talk, we will discuss why social media has maintained relevance even with the advent of LLM and analyze efforts to regulate it. We'll then discuss challenges to auditing social media platforms, guided by two works. I am an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy. I recently finished my postdoc at Stanford HAI, where I had an amazing time working with Percy Liang in Computer Science and Daniel E. Ho in the Law School's RegLab. Before that, I completed my PhD at MIT EECS under the wonderful mentorship of Aleksander Mądry and Devavrat Shah, my master's at Oxford with Paul Newman, and my undergraduate at Princeton with Naomi Leonard. My research falls at the intersection of machine learning and AI accountability. On the technical side, I love learning new methods. I enjoy using tools and principles from a wide range of fields, including machine learning, statistics, game theory, causal inference, and information theory to tackle research questions. The goal of my research is to better design, understand, and govern AI and automated systems. As a consequence, I also have a strong interest in law, policy, ethics, and philosophy. My research approaches research areas and problems—such as AI audits, interpretable machine learning, data ownership, and recommender systems—from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Recently, I have written on reducing information-resource gaps in AI accountability; the regulation and auditing of social media algorithms; the emergence of AI supply chains; the estimation of counterfactual potential outcomes under spillover effects; how competing for resources under uncertainty affects long-term outcomes; and individual-level rights of data-driven decision subjects. If you're interested in thinking about these interdisciplinary problems together, please reach out and tell me what you're thinking about!
Sarah Cen
Description

In this talk, we will discuss why social media has maintained relevance even with the advent of LLM and analyze efforts to regulate it. We'll then discuss challenges to auditing social media platforms, guided by two works.

Location Name
Kline Tower 14th Floor
Full Address
Kline Tower
219 Prospect St, 14th Floor
New Haven, CT 06511
United States
Session Type
Lecture
Title
"Social media, its regulation, and the challenges of auditing social media platforms"
Abstract
In this talk, we will discuss why social media has maintained relevance even with the advent of LLM and analyze efforts to regulate it. We'll then discuss challenges to auditing social media platforms, guided by two works.