Research Interest

Content Moderation of Social Media, Critical Internet Studies, Digital Labor, Feminist Media Studies, Critical Information Studies

Biography

Sarah T. Roberts is an associate professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice. Roberts researches information work and workers, and is a leading global authority on “commercial content moderation,” the term she coined to describe the work of those responsible for making sure media content posted to major commercial social platforms fall within legal, ethical, and the site’s own guidelines and standards. She is frequently consulted on matters of policy, worker welfare, and governance related to content moderation issues and the broader social media landscape. She can be seen and heard in many news reports, interviews, podcasts and programs. Additionally, she has experience in industry as a consultant and researcher, most recently working as a Staff Researcher for Twitter in 2022. She has served as an expert witness in several litigation matters worldwide. She is a 2018 Carnegie Fellow and winner of the 2018 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Barlow Pioneer Award in recognition of her work on commercial content moderation. She is a 2023 honoree of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. The Data Fix podcast recently described her as “THE cultural critic we need right now, on all things tech & society.” Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, was released in June 2019 and in paperback with a new preface in early 2022 (Yale University Press) and in a French edition, Derrière les écrans (Éditions La Découverte) in October 2020. A Mandarin edition appeared in early 2023. A second monograph is underway.

Publications

2018. Digital detritus: ‘Error’ and the logic of opacity in social media content moderation 2019. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth

In the Media

• The Data Fix, “Episode 01: Grievance”
• The Cleaners, Gebrüder Beetz Productions | Emmy Award-nominated film inspired by Roberts’ research on commercial content moderation
• The Collapse of Twitter, Zombie Cyberlibertarianism, & Commercial Content Moderation With Sarah T. Roberts