I’m a Assistant Teaching Professor at The Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University. I am a faculty affialiate of The Northeastern Ethics Insititute. I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh at The University of Texas at Arlington. I was part of the Security and Privacy Research Lab during my time at The University of Texas at Arlington. My work has earned distinguished honors, including the best technical poster awards at NDSS 2022. My research has been cited in official reports submitted to The US Supreme Court and the EU Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs. I have also served on numerous program committees for top international conferences and workshops on computer security, privacy, web, and social media.

Research Interests

My current research interest include social computing, data-driven fact checking, content moderation, data mining and algorithmic fairness and ethics. My research takes a highly interdisciplinary approach, integrating AI, NLP, social sciences, and ethics to address societal issues of social media and its broader implications.

Research Keywords

Cybersecurity, Privacy, Social Media Analysis, Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Content Moderation, Ethics of AI models

Publications

Kumarswamy, N.*, Singhal, M.*, & Nilizadeh, S. (2025). Casual Insights into Parler’s Content Moderation Shift: Effects on Toxicity and Factuality. To appear in The ACM Web Conference, WWW 2025 . (* Joint Co-First Authors)

Vafa, E. P.*, Singhal, M.*, Thota, P., & Roy, S. S. (2024, November). Learning from Censored Experiences: Social Media Discussions around Censorship Circumvention Technologies. In 2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) (pp. 62-62). IEEE Computer Society. (* Joint Co-First Authors)

Singhal, M., Pacheco, J., Khorzooghi, S. M. S. M., Debi, T., Asudeh, A., Das, G., & Nilizadeh, S. (2023). Auditing Yelp’s Business Ranking and Review Recommendation Through the Lens of Fairness. To appear in 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2025. arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.02129.

Singhal, M., Ling, C., Paudel, P., Thota, P., Kumarswamy, N., Stringhini, G., & Nilizadeh, S. (2022). SoK: Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice. In 8th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, EuroS&P 2023. {Paper}

Singhal, M., Kumarswamy, N., Kinhekar, S., & Nilizadeh, S. (2021). Cybersecurity Misinformation Detection on Social Media: Case Studies on Phishing Reports and Zoom’s Threats. In 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2023. {Paper} (18% acceptance rate)

Singhal, M., Kumarswamy, N., Kinhekar, S., & Nilizadeh, S. (2021). Poster: Detecting Misinformation about Zoom’s Security and Privacy Threats. In NDSS 2022 {Paper}. Recieved Best Technical Poster

Singhal, M., & Levine, D. (2019, October). Analysis and categorization of drive-by download malware. In 2019 4th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Security, ICCCS 2019 {Paper}.

Preprints

Aleksandric, A., Singhal, M., Groggel, A., & Nilizadeh, S. (2022). Understanding the Bystander Effect on Toxic Twitter Conversations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.10764.

Salehabadi, N., Groggel, A., Singhal, M., Roy, S. S., & Nilizadeh, S. (2022). User Engagement and the Toxicity of Tweets. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.03856.

Recent News

January 2025: Our paper titled “Casual Insights into Parler’s Content Moderation Shift: Effects on Toxicity and Factuality” got accepted to WWW 2025.

November 2024: Our paper titled “Auditing Yelp’s Business Ranking and Review Recommendation Through the Lens of Fairness” got accepted to ICWSM 2025.

November 2024: I am part of the Northeastern Ethics Institute.

September 2024: Our paper titled “Learning from Censored Experiences: Social Media Discussions around Censorship Circumvention Technologies” got accepted to IEEE S&P 2025.

August 2024: I started as Assistant Teaching Professor at Northeastern University.

May 2024: I passed my Dissertation Defense.

February 2024: Our paper SoK: Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice was cited in Amicus Curiae Brief submitted in two seperate Supreme Court cases [NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton] & Moody v. NetChoice, LLC.

February 2024: Serving on the 17th Workshop on Cybersecurity Experimentation and Test Workshop (CSET 2024) program committee.

November 2023: I am now a lifelong member of the UTA Texas Gamma Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon.

November 2023: I passed my Dissertation Proposal Defense.

November 2023: I will be teaching CSE4380 in Spring 2024.

October 2023: My Research Lightning talk on SoK: Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice recieved the Audience Choice Award in the Ph.D. Lightning Talk event held at The 50th Anniversary of The Computer Science and Engineering department at The University of Texas at Arlington.

July 2023: I received the student travel grant for Euro S&P 2023. Thanks S&P!!!

June 2023: Our paper SoK: Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice was cited in the official report submitted to The Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in European Union.

May 2023: I will be a GRA for NSF funded project in the Summer of 2023.

April 2023: I will be teaching CSE4380 in Fall 2023.

March 2023: Serving on the 16th Workshop on Cybersecurity Experimentation and Test Workshop (CSET 2023) program committee.

March 2023: Our paper SoK: Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice was cited in Amicus Curiae Brief submitted in The Supreme Court case Gonzalez v. Google LLC.

February 2023: My Research Lightning talk on Detecting Misinformation about Zoom’s Security and Privacy Threats recieved the Best Ph.D. Lightning Talk Runner-Up award at SCRF 2023.

February 2023: Our poster on Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice received the Best Project Presentation & Demo Runner-Up award at SCRF 2023.

February 2023: Our paper titled “SoK: Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice” got accepted to EuroS&P 2023.

October 2022: I will be teaching CSE4380 in Spring 2023. Draft of the Syllabus.

October 2022: I received “The Outstanding TA Award” at The UTA CSE Mouser Electronics Awards Banquet.

August 2022: Our paper titled “Cybersecurity Misinformation Detection on Social Media: Case Studies on Phishing Reports and Zoom’s Threats” got accepted to ICWSM 2023.

April 2022: Our poster on “Detecting Misinformation about Zoom’s Security and Privacy Threats” received the best technical poster award at NDSS 2022.

February 2022: Our poster on “Detecting Misinformation about Zoom’s Security and Privacy Threats” received the best project/poster demo award at SCRF 2022.

Contact

The best way to reach me is via email: m [dot] singhal [at] northeastern [dot] edu