Sarah Roberts Keynote Speaker

Dr Sarah T. Roberts is Co-Director of UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, known for her research into content moderation on the internet and social media. She is an expert and speaker on information work, information workers, the internet and its social, economic and political impact.

Sarah Roberts is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA. She was previously Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and prior to that, worked as an information technology professional for 15 years.

Sarah is primarily interested in the content moderation of major social media platforms, news media and corporate brands. She studies the large-scale adjudication of UGC (user-generated content) online, which she coined “Commercial Content Moderation” (CCM) and the ethics behind this.

She was consultant to the award-winning documentary The Cleaners, which debuted at Sundance 2018, and is the author of ‘Behind the Screen Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media’ a book on the individuals whose job it is to screen the internet of hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty. Her insights regularly feature in international TV, radio and media publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde, amongst others.

She was elected to the board of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, is a 2018 Carnegie Fellow and received the EFF Barlow Pioneer Award 2018 for her groundbreaking research on social media content moderation. She completed a Ph.D. at the iSchool at the University of Illinois.