Alice E. Marwick, PhD (she/her) is the Director of Research at the Data & Society Research Institute, a nonprofit research institute that examines the social, political, and legal implications of data-driven technologies. She manages and mentors the research team, oversees D&S’s research portfolio of four programs — AI on the Ground, AI Civics, Labor Futures, and Trustworthy Infrastructures — and heads the Democracy in the Age of AI research theme; she also provides intellectual leadership to the organization, serves on its Senior Leadership Team, and represents D&S at academic and civil society gatherings. Dr. Marwick is also a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Senior Faculty Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life, which she co-founded, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Alice’s qualitative research program investigates the legal, social, and cultural implications of social media technologies and artificial intelligence. She is currently leading Data & Society’s research on youth vulnerability to AI-enabled financial fraud and scams, supported by a Hewlett Foundation grant. Recent publications from this work include ScamGPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud (2025, with Lana Swartz and Kate Larson) and Deepfake Financial Fraud: The Global Regulation of AI-Driven Scams (2026, with Anya Schiffrin et al.). She is also known for her work on critical disinformation studies, online self-presentation, networked privacy, and context collapse.
Dr. Marwick is currently finishing a book project tentatively titled Down the Rabbit Hole: The Intellectual Journeys of Violent Racists, Conspiracy Theorists, Flat Earthers, and Other Americans on the Fringe, which uses digital ethnography, interviews, and discourse analysis to explain how people come to believe fringe, extremist, and conspiratorial ideas encountered on social platforms. Her 2023 monograph, The Private is Political: Networked Privacy on Social Media (Yale), won the APSA Information Technology & Politics Section’s Best Book Award (2024) and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. It examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately affects people marginalized by gender identity, race, sexuality, and socioeconomic status.
In 2017, she co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online for Data & Society, a flagship 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. 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, and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017).
Marwick was formerly Associate Professor of Communication (with tenure) and Principal Researcher at CITAP at UNC Chapel Hill (2020–2024); Assistant Professor at UNC (2017–2020); a Microsoft Visiting Professor at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton (2023–2024); Director of the McGannon Communication Research Center and Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University (2012–2016); and a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England (2010–2012). She has a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from New York University, an MA in Communication from the University of Washington, and a BA from Wellesley College.
Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Luminate Group, the Hewlett Foundation, the Digital Trust Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. She is a former Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020–2022), won UNC’s Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement (2021), and has provided statements for the record to the January 6th Select Committee (2022) and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (2025), alongside consultations with the FTC, DHS, NIST AISI, the New York Attorney General’s office, UNDP, and the U.S. State Department. She sits on the advisory board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and serves as a science advisor to the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University.
Alice is married and has two children. She is a pop culture enthusiast, a Drag Race superfan, and a chronic fashion victim.
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