Julia Angwin

Julia Angwin
Alma mater	University of Chicago (BA) Columbia University (MBA Graduate School of Business)
Occupation	Investigative journalist, Senior reporter, Co-founder of The Markup

Julia Angwin is an investigative journalist,^[1] co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Markup. She was a senior reporter at ProPublica until April 2018^[2] and staff reporter at the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2013. Angwin is author of non-fiction books, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (2009) and Dragnet Nation (2014).^[3]

The Markup

In April 2018, Angwin and Jeff Larson left ProPublica to found The Markup, described on their website as a "nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom" that will produce "data-centered journalism" to uncover "societal harms of technology".^[4] They were joined by Sue Gardner, as a co-founder, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and several ProPublica staff members.^[5][6] Harvard-University-based NiemanLab described Angwin and Larson as a "journalist-programmer team" at ProPublica who uncovered stories such as "how algorithms are biased".^[7]

Wall Street Journal

Angwin was a Wall Street Journal staff reporter based at their New York bureau covering business and technology for thirteen years from 2000 to 2013, when she left for ProPublica.^[8] In their review of Dragnet Nation, The Economist, wrote that Angwin, beginning in 2010, had overseen Wall Street Journal's "pioneering series" entitled "What They Know" which exposed how privacy was being eroded with most people completely unaware that it was happening.^[9] While at the Wall Street Journal, in 2010, Angwin wrote about how Google's co-founders, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt disagreed on the development of Google Chrome with Schmidt opposing the idea because of potential "browser wars".^[10] A November 23, 2009 article by Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler, entitled "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" on the "unprecedented numbers of the millions" of Wikipedia editors that were quitting, was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.^[11]

ProPublica

Angwin was a senior reporter and investigative journalist at ProPublica, that was described as The New York Times as "big tech's scariest watchdog."^[12] In 2016, Angwin was lead author of an article revealing machine bias against black people in criminal risk assessment that used machine learning systems.^[7] This investigation led to the discovery of advertisements that violated anti-discrimination laws on platforms such as Facebook, which gave advertisers the option to not have their ads be shown to specific races. Her investigations and publications have also called into question to what extent social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are responsible for monitoring the content posted on their sites. ^[13]

In a 2016 article entitled "Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking", Angwin revealed that Google had changed its privacy policy allowing Google to merge users' personally identifiable information. Following publication of her article, Google announced that this precluded advertisement targeting through Gmail keywords.^[14]

Books

Angwin is the author of Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America^[15] and Dragnet Nation.^[3] In his New York Times "Sunday Book Review" of Stealing MySpace, Michael Agger described Angwin's "meticulously" detailed description of Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace in 2005 from Intermix Media despite competition from News Corp and Viacom, as "so granular that it passes through boring into surreal."^[16] The Washington Post's Scott Rosenberg compared Stealing MySpace to Kara Swisher's There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner debacle and the quest for the digital future.^{[17] [18]} The Economist,^[9] Kirkus Reviews,^[19] and the Los Angeles Times gave Dragnet Nation favorable reviews.^[20]

In a 2014 interview with Bill Moyers about Dragnet Nation, Angwin described reporters as "prime targets for Internet snooping" and "the canary in the coal mine" of internet privacy - the first to feel the "impact of total surveillance". She said that as "watch dogs for democracy", journalists need to protect their sources.^[8] In a 2014 interview with Kirkus Reviews's Neha Sharma, Angwin said that she had become aware of data scraping while researching Stealing MySpace. To protect her own digital content, she began using Tails.^[1]

Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting

In 2003 Angwin was one of The Wall Street Journal's staff reporters whose stories on the history and impact of corporate scandals in the United States, were acknowledged with a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

References