A UCLA professor was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow on Wednesday.
Sarah Roberts, an assistant professor of information studies, was named a 2018 Carnegie Fellow for her research on commercial content moderation and received $200,000 for her research.
Commercial content moderation involves human screening of content posted on social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, to control or remove objectionable content.
The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program was established in 2015 to support scholarship and research in the social sciences and humanities. The program was made in an effort to tackle contemporary world issues, especially humanitarian ones, and changes in global cultures over time, according to the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s website.
Roberts was selected for the program from over 270 applicants. She joined UCLA in 2016 and has conducted research on social media privacy and internet governance.
In 2017, Roberts developed and held a conference on commercial content moderation at UCLA, which was considered to be the first national research conference on the topic.
The Carnegie Fellows award will support Roberts’ research on the working conditions and mental health of workers responsible for removing obscene, hurtful and violent content.