Alice E. Marwick

Alice E. Marwick is the director of research at Data & Society. She is a qualitative social scientist who researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies and artificial intelligence. Her most recent book, The Private is Political: Networked Privacy on Social Media (Yale 2023), examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts members of marginalized communities. In 2017, Alice co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, a flagship Data & Society report examining the far-right use of social media to spread disinformation. She also wrote Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), an ethnographic study of the San Francisco tech scene, and was co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017), in addition to many academic papers and public reports. She is currently writing her third book, on fringe epistemologies and online radicalization, supported by an Andrew Carnegie fellowship. In addition to supervising the research team, Alice runs Data & Society’s initiatives around AI and democracy, including work on AI-driven scams and fraud.

Alice was previously associate professor of communication and principal researcher and co-founder of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, and Microsoft Visiting Professor at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. She serves on the advisory board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and as science advisor to the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in media, culture, and communication from New York University, a MA in communication from the University of Washington, and a BA from Wellesley College. She lives in New York City with her husband and two kids.