Biography

Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. 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. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2019), was released in paperback with a new preface in 2021, and in translation in French (2020) and in Mandarin (2023). She can be seen in several feature-length documentaries, including The Cleaners (2018), for which her work served as inspiration.