Bio

Danielle K. Citron is the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor of Law, Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law where she writes and teaches about privacy, free expression, and civil rights. She is the inaugural director of the Law School’s LawTech Center. In 2019, Citron was named a MacArthur Fellow based on her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy. In 2024, she was ranked the #1 legal scholar among the Top 100 Law Scholars, based on citation impact and scholarly influence, making her the first woman to achieve this recognition.

Citron has worked with lawmakers, law enforcement and tech companies to combat online abuse and protect intimate privacy. During the Biden administration, she served as an adviser to the White House Gender Policy Council. In 2019, she testified twice before Congress about the national security and privacy risks of deepfakes and the Communications Decency Act. From 2014 to 2016, Citron served as an advisor to then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris and as a member of Harris’ Task Force to Combat Cyber Exploitation and Violence Against Women. In 2011, Citron testified about misogynistic cyber hate speech before the Inter-Parliamentary Committee on Anti-Semitism at the House of Commons in the United Kingdom. She was a member of Facebook’s Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery Task Force from 2018 to 2021. She advised Twitter from 2009-2022, serving on the company’s Trust and Safety Council; she advised the video-sharing platform TikTok from 2020-23 and live-streaming platform Twitch in 2024. She serves on the Safety Advisory Council for the music-streaming service Spotify.

Her latest book, “The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age” (W.W. Norton and Penguin Vintage UK 2022) and has been featured and excerpted in The New Yorker, Wired, Fortune, Guardian (UK), Prospect Magazine (UK) and The Times (UK). Amazon named her book in the Top 100 books of 2022. Her first book, “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace” (Harvard University Press, 2014), was named one of the 20 Best Moments for Women in 2014 by the editors of Cosmopolitan magazine. She has published more than 60 law review articles and essays, including in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, Boston University Law Review and Virginia Law Review, among others; has won professional awards, including being named the 2024 IAPP Privacy Leader; and has been cited by state and federal courts, federal regulations, and White House reports. She has written more than 50 opinion pieces for major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and Slate.

Citron is the vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for civil rights and liberties in the digital age founded in 2013 and named after her article “Cyber Civil Rights.” She serves on the board of directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Citron is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a member of the American Law Institute, she serves as an adviser to the Restatement Third, Information Privacy Principles Project and Restatement (Third) Torts: Defamation and Privacy.

Citron has appeared on film and television (HBO’s “Vice News,” HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” Hulu’s “The Weekly” and “Ashley Madison Diaries,” “Netizens” and HBO’s “Swiped”); quoted in hundreds of news articles, interviewed on National Public Radio; appeared on podcasts for The New York Times, Slate, Lawfare, The Guardian and The Boston Globe; and given a TED talk, “How Deepfakes Undermine Truth and Democracy,” at the 2019 TED Global Summit. Her TED talk has been viewed more than 3.5 million times. She has given more than 400 talks at universities, federal and state agencies, the National Holocaust Museum, the Wikimedia Foundation, the National Association of Attorneys General, and think tanks.

Before joining UVA Law, Citron taught at Boston University School of Law and the University of Maryland School of Law. She has been a visiting professor at Fordham Law School and George Washington Law School. In 2016, she was a Dean’s Distinguished Visitor at Washington University School of Law and an interdisciplinary studies fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Member, Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023)

The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age 
(W.W. Norton & Penguin UK 2022) Order on Amazon

TED Talk: How Deepfakes Undermine Truth and Threaten Democracy (2019)

Danielle Citron named a MacArthur Fellow (2019)

Hate Crimes in Cyberspace 
(Harvard University Press 2014)