Invited Speaker 1: Katherine Lo

Talk Title: TBA

Kat Lo is the Content Moderation Program Lead at Meedan and visiting researcher at the University of California, Irvine specializing in online moderation and harassment. Lo consults with technology, social media, and game companies on platform policy and enforcement. She also serves on the advisory board for nonprofits and advocacy organizations that focus on online harassment and mental health.

Invited Speaker 2: Safiya Noble

Talk Title: TBA

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Departments of Information Studies and African American Studies. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in journals and periodicals including the Los Angeles Review of Books, featured in the New York Public Library 2018 Best Books for Adults(non-fiction), and recognized by Bustle magazine as one of 10 Books about Race to Read Instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You.

Safiya is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. Her academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology..

Invited Speaker 3: Sarah T. Roberts

Talk Title: TBA

Sarah T. Roberts is an assistant professor of Information Studies at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, specializing in Internet culture, social media, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is founding co-director, along with Dr. Safiya Noble, of the forthcoming UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.

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 commercial websites fit 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 moderation issues.

She is a 2018 Carnegie Fellow and winner of the 2018 EFF Barlow Pioneer Award in recognition of her work on commercial content moderation.

Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, will be released on June 25 2019 (Yale University Press).