Sarah Roberts

Sarah T. Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies (Graduate School of Education & Information Studies) at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. from the iSchool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UCLA in 2016, she was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario for three years. On the internet since 1993, she was previously an information technology professional for 15 years, and, as such, her research interests focus on information work and workers and on the social, economic and political impact of the widespread adoption of the internet in everyday life.

Professor Roberts is internationally recognized as a leading scholar on the emerging topic of commercial content moderation of social media (or CCM, for short) a term she coined to define the field study around the large-scale, industrial and for-pay practice of social media user-generated content adjudication. In December of 2017 she hosted All Things in Moderation on the UCLA campus, a first-of-its-kind conference to bring researchers, civil society advocates, workers, journalists and industry representatives together to discuss issues pertaining to social media moderation. Her book on commercial content moderation, entitled Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, is forthcoming in 2019 from Yale University Press.

She served as consultant to and is featured in the award-winning documentary, The Cleaners, which debuted at Sundance 2018 and airs on PBS in the United States in November 2018.

Roberts is frequently consulted by the press and others on issues related to social media, society and culture. She has been interviewed on these topics in print, on radio and on television worldwide including: The New York Times, Associated Press, Le Monde, The Economist, the BBC, the CBC, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Wired, The Washington Post, News Corp Australia, Asahi Shimbun, and CNN, among others. Dr. Roberts was recently elected to the board of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

She is a 2018 Carnegie Fellow and a 2018 recipient of the EFF Barlow Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on content moderation of social media.