Danielle Citron Named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow

“Genius” grant comes with $650,000 to further her research on privacy rights and hate crimes in cyberspace.

BU Law Professor Danielle Citron

Boston University’s Danielle Citron, whose pioneering and policy-shaping work in countering hate crimes, revenge porn, and other cyberspace abuses has made her one of the nation’s leading privacy and constitutional law scholars, has been named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.

Professor Citron and the other new fellows, whose names were announced Wednesday morning by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will each receive a $650,000 no-strings-attached “genius” grant in recognition of their exceptional creativity, significant achievements, and promise for future advances. For researchers, writers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and all recipients, it is one of the highest honors they can receive.

Citron, who joined LAW in July 2019 and is a member of the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering Cyber Security, Law, and Society Alliance, says she was stunned when John Palfrey, MacArthur Foundation president, called her a couple weeks ago with the news. “I screamed,” she says. “I fell on the floor. It’s crazy, right? Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson are MacArthur Fellows—I can’t believe I’m in the same group.” (Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates received a MacArthur fellowship in 2015 and public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, in 1995.)

“At first I thought I was being punked, and I was sure it was my privacy friends who were teasing me,” she says. “And then I realized it was John Palfrey’s real voice. I’d heard him give talks on YouTube.”

An advocate and scholar, Citron is vice president of the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, whose mission is to combat online abuses that threaten civil rights and civil liberties, and the author of the widely cited Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Harvard University Press, 2014), as well as more than 30 major law review articles on privacy, cyber harassment, and how to balance freedom of expression with civil rights and civil liberties on the internet. Citron says she will use at least some of her MacArthur grant to write her second book, on sexual privacy.

“We are thrilled that Professor Citron has been named a MacArthur Fellow,” says Robert A. Brown, president of BU. Citron joins Nancy Kopell, a William Fairfied Warren Professor and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of mathematics, as BU’s only current MacArthur Fellows. “These awards recognize an individual’s potential to make transformative changes. We’re very proud that Professor Citron has been recognized as a member of this highly selective group.”

Danielle Citron, Legal Scholar, 2019 MacArthur Fellow

Q&A

Danielle Citron Warns That Deepfake Videos Could Undermine the 2020 Election

Every presidential candidate needs to start preparing now, privacy scholar says.

Danielle Citron is worried. Deepfake videos are here—you may have watched one already and not even realized it—and they could undermine the 2020 presidential election.

Citron, a leading privacy scholar, who joined the School of Law as a professor of law in July, and is a member of the Hariri Institute’s Cyber Security, Law, and Society Alliance, coauthored an essay published this week on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website calling for every candidate for president to take immediate steps to counter deepfakes and outlining an eight-point deep fakes emergency campaign plan.

Why the urgency? Only the future of our democracy is at stake.

Deepfakes are hard to detect, harder to debunk, highly realistic videos and audio clips that make people appear to be saying and doing things they never said or did. Enabled by rapidly advancing machine learning, they are distributed at lightning speed through social media. A recent example highlighting the danger of manipulated videos is a video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that made it appear as if she were drunk and slurring her words. It got more than 2.5 million views on Facebook, and while it was relatively easy to tell that the video had been altered (Citron and other experts call it a cheap-fake rather than a deepfake), it went viral anyway, with an assist from President Trump, who tweeted a clip that first aired on Fox News.

Citron, an expert on deepfakes, testified on manipulated media, particularly deepfakes, in June before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Warning that technology will soon enable the creation of deepfakes that will be impossible to distinguish from the real thing, she told lawmakers: “Under assault will be reputations, political discourse, elections, journalism, national security, and truth as the foundation of democracy.”

BU Today talked with Citron about why we should be worried about deepfakes, how they could threaten the 2020 election, and what can be done about digital forgeries and other online disinformation.

Professor Citron’s TED talk: How Deepfakes Undermine Truth and Threaten Democracy

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  • Lauren Eckenroth

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    Lauren Eckenroth

    Lauren Eckenroth has been writing and editing stories for and about higher education since 2013. She is the editor of The Record magazine at Boston University School of Law, where she strives to tell stories that reflect and celebrate the BU Law community. Prior to joining the law school, she was the editor of BU's Research magazine. Profile