Sarah Roberts

Sarah Roberts serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies within the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her academic profile centers on the critical examination of digital labor, particularly the hidden work of content moderation, and the societal implications of information technologies across global contexts including Southeast Asia.

Her educational background includes:

• Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• M.A. in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• B.A. in French and Spanish with a Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Roberts' research interests encompass information work and workers, library and information organizational management, IT infrastructure and planning, social media and the Internet, digital economy, internet governance and policy, digital ethics, and analog gaming. She is a leading scholar in commercial content moderation, having pioneered critical studies on the labor conditions of social media content moderators through ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical analysis that bridges information science with critical race theory and labor studies.

An analysis of her recent publications (2020-2024) reveals a consistent trajectory examining structural racism in technology platforms, the human dimensions of AI development, mental health impacts on content moderators, and governance failures in social media ecosystems. Her work consistently demonstrates how commercial content moderation constitutes digital 'dirty work' performed predominantly by marginalized global labor forces, while connecting platform design to systemic issues of algorithmic bias, digital discrimination, and corporate accountability in the attention economy.