hi

love adu

welcome!

Hey! My name is Love Adu (the one in blue).

I study platform governance, discourse, and the political economy of technology at UC Berkeley.

I used to be a member of the Board of Governors for the California Community Colleges (appointed by Governor Newsom), and I've done research and policy work at Haas, the Oxford Computational Political Science Group, OutVote, IRLE @ Berkeley, the California Department of Technology, Issue One, the Roosevelt Network, Groundwork Collaborative, and a few other places.

On the side I spend too much time dancing to early 2000s Beyoncé albums, thinking about the consequences of modern technology, and eating mango yogurt (shoutout Hui Lau Shan @ Berkeley).

updates

  • aug 6presenting at the ASA CITMAS Media Sociology Symposium
  • 2026attending ACM FAccT
  • 2027attending CHI
pls pick a good photo lmao

work i've written

full cv (pdf)

  • “The Wall Against Competition: Big Tech's Exceptionalist Positioning and the Regulatory Immunity of Section 230”: how dominant tech firms use Silicon Valley exceptionalism to build a policy wall against regulatory accountability. Roosevelt Network, pending 2027.
  • “Guilty by Retweet: Engagement Metrics as Infrastructure for Moral Attribution”: on how likes and retweets function as symbolic currency for collective boundary-work. ASA CITMAS Media Sociology Symposium.
  • “The Artifice of Algorithmic Autonomy”: a computational text analysis of ~957,000 articles on how anthropomorphizing AI diffuses institutional responsibility. UC Berkeley CITRIS Tech Policy Symposium, 2026.
  • “Algorithmic Curation and Its Effects on LGBTQ Youth Civic Engagement”: on how social platforms shape queer voter outreach and political discourse. OutVote HQ.

research interests

Two paths of thought I'm pursuing:

  • offline → online: how offline rhetoric from the tech industry has shaped culture, and through culture, socioeconomic and sociopolitical conditions, via law, policy, and media.
    • The anthropomorphization of AI agents in tech advertising, media, and marketing.
    • Big Tech's exceptionalist, “not like other girls” contrarian positioning, and how it's helped keep Section 230 without reform.
  • online → offline: how online society and culture operate on their own terms, and how that in turn influences socioeconomic and sociopolitical formations and dynamics.
    • The anthropomorphization of AI agents, and its implications for subliminal formations in users about expectations of dominated labor.
    • Cancel culture and online engagement metrics as moral economies, possibly an extension of not getting justice for racism, sexism, and immoral behavior broadly offline, so people go looking for it online instead, as a kind of vigilante justice.
    • With AI and bots in comment sections, and other people's comments shaping the moral read of a situation: how much of our morality is actually our own?
    • The rhetoric and formation of hate speech online, particularly in racist, queerphobic, and misogynistic registers.
    • Lolcows, memes, and the rhetoric of hate online.
    • Eugenics via “looksmaxing,” and its sociohistorical lineage.

my research network

lenses (comp ling, culture, social theory, rhetoric) mechanisms (tech industry, law, media, policy) effects (governance, institutional power, political economy of tech) consequences (socioeconomic conditions, inequality)

say hi

Email: loveadu@berkeley.edu
LinkedIn