Danielle Citron


Danielle Keats Citron is a Professor of Law at Boston University Law School where she teaches and writes about privacy, free speech, and civil procedure. Prior to joining BU Law, she was the Morton & Sophia Macht Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Her work focuses on information privacy, free expression, and civil rights. Citron is the author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.

Biography

Citron graduated from Duke University, and the Fordham University School of Law.
She is an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society, an Affiliate Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, a Tech Fellow at , and a member of the Principles Group for the Harvard-MIT Artificial Intelligence Fund. In 2017, she was elected as a member of the American Law Institute and currently serves on the Advisory Board of ALI's Information Privacy Principles Project. She is the Vice President and Board Member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a civil rights and civil liberties project named after her article Cyber Civil Rights. She serves on the advisory board of Teach Privacy, SurvJustice, the International Association of Privacy Professionals Privacy Bar, and Without My Consent. She serves on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, and the Board of Directors for the Future of Privacy Forum. She was the Chair of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Board of Directors and currently serves on the board. In 2019, Citron was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in cyber harassment.
Citron is an expert on online harassment, and has written for the New York Times, Slate Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Scientist, TIME, and Al Jazeera. She has been a guest on The Diane Rehm Show, The Kojo Nnamdi Show, and Slate Magazines The Gist podcast. She is also a Forbes contributor. She has authored over 30 law review articles.
Citron helped Maryland State Senator Jon Cardin draft a bill criminalizing the nonconsensual publication of nude images, which was passed into law in 2014. From 2014 to December 2016, Citron served as an advisor to California Attorney General Kamala Harris. She served as a member of AG Harris’s Task Force to Combat Cyber Exploitation and Violence Against Women.
Citron is a critic of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, stating that it gives online platforms a "free pass" from having to do moderation, while market forces are driving a rise of "salacious, negative, and novel content" on the Internet. In a 2017 Fordham Law Review paper with Benjamin Wittes, Citron argued that "the internet will not break denying bad samaritans § 230 immunity". At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in June 2019 and at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in October 2019, Citron proposed to condition section 230 protection on "reasonable" content moderation practices, an idea which the Electronic Frontier Foundation called "terrifying", arguing it would lead to excessive litigation risks especially for small businesses. On the other hand, Citron has expressed partial agreement with critics of the 2018 FOSTA act, in particular with regard to uncertainties resulting from the law's "knowing facilitation" standard.

Selected works

;Books
;Book chapters
;Articles