Associate professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; cofounder of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life

Alice E. Marwick

Alice E. Marwick is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and principal researcher at its Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, which she co-founded. A Data & Society advisor and former fellow, she researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. In 2017, Marwick co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, a flagship D&S report examining far-right online subcultures’ use of social media to spread disinformation, for which she was named one of 2017’s Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. 

Marwick’s most recent book, The Private is Political (Yale 2023), examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, and socio-economic status. She is also the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), an ethnographic study of the San Francisco tech scene which examines how people seek social status through online visibility, and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017). In addition to academic journal articles and essays, she has written for popular outlets including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and Scientific American. Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Luminate Group, the Digital Trust Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, and she has been a fellow at the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UNC-CH. As a 2020 Andrew Carnegie fellow, she is working on a book about online radicalization. In 2021, she was awarded the Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement by the University of North Carolina.

All Work