Sebastian Kane '26 wins Firestone Medal for honors thesis

Sociology and Data Science major Sebastian Kane was awarded a Firestone Medal for his undergraduate honors thesis, From Post to Protest: Networked Social Movements and the Digital Diffusion of Collective Action.  Emerita Professor Susan Olzak (pictured with Kane) served as his thesis advisor. The Firestone Medal recognizes the top 10 percent of honors theses completed at Stanford each year.

In her nomination, Olzak wrote that Kane's thesis "represents a major step forward in the use of artificial intelligence for social movement research."

"His theoretical work addresses a central question at the intersection of social movements and media influence: Does an escalation in online public discourse influence offline protest activity, and if so, under what conditions?" she wrote. "This is, to my knowledge, the first systematic attempt to use Large Language Models to extract information about the effect of online depictions of social movement activity on violent and nonviolent protest activity. The originality and potential impact of this work are exceptional."

Professor Michael Rosenfeld, director of undergraduate studies, nominated Kane's paper for the Firestone Medal, describing it as one of the most impressive honors thesis he has evaluated during his 25 years of reviewing undergraduate research.

Rosenfeld said Kane tackled one of the most enduring questions in social movement scholarship: whether online discourse influences real-world protest activity.

"In this thesis, Kane attempts to figure out if tweets about Black Lives Matter (BLM), either pro or con, affected the size or frequency of subsequent protest events," Rosenfeld said. "This is a fundamental question about cross-influence between online and face-to-face social movement organizing, which scholars have been puzzling over for years but have not come close to solving. Kane has, in my opinion, written the defining work on this question."