Tufekci was born in Istanbul, Turkey, near Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district. She worked as a computer programmer before becoming an academic and turning her attention to social science. Her research and publications include topics such as the effect of big data on politics and the public sphere, how social media affects social movements, and the privacy and security vulnerabilities exposed by the coming Internet of Things. In general, she has sought to outline the potential negative societal consequences of social media and big data, while not rejecting these phenomena outright.
She gave her first TED talk in October 2014 on online social change, for example, which argued that while technology can make organizing social movements easier, it does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. She gave a third TED talk in September 2017 on how social media and tech companies are not passive actors – "how the same algorithms companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information", and stating in her TED talk: "We need a digital economy where our data and our attention is not for sale to the highest bidding authoritarian or demagogue." She made the case that the ad-based infrastructure of platforms like Facebook and YouTube were helping authoritarians. Her earlier second TED talk had argued that artificial intelligence and especially machine learning had made human morals more important. In the fall of 2017 Tufekci delivered a talk entitled Democracy vs. Clickbait, at Dartmouth's Neukom Institute's Donoho Colloquium, where she stated that she'd done "all the calculations" and "read their FCC filings" and discovered that Facebook is only making about $10 to $20 USD per year per person. "Charge me that," she suggested, "and make me the customer." On May 9, 2019 Tufekci was featured as a speaker at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security Symposium at the Columbia Journalism School. She was featured in a special report by The Economist on technology and politics in which she argues that the increasingly individualized targeting of voters by political campaigns is leading to a reduction of the "public sphere" in which civic debate takes place publicly.
Books and articles
In May 2017, Yale University Press published Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. The book is freely available under a Creative Commons license. In March 2018, Tufekci wrote in the New York Times that, "YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century." She cited the rise of conspiracy videos during the Trump administration and especially after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In January 2018, she wrote a cover story for Wired titled "It's the Golden Age of Free Speech." She has since written more columns for Wired. She has also been writing columns for The Scientific American as of February 2019, including one on sociological versus psychological story telling titled "The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones." She has also written on pandemic planning and social responses. In 2014 she wrote on Ebola and pandemic preparedness. In 2020 she wrote numerous articles on Covid-19, including early articles explaining the importance of flattening the curve, the importance of mask wearing, and academic articles covering the evidence for mask wearing. She was critical of the mainstream media for failing to explain the importance of mask wearing, and is often cited as one of the first to take up the importance of mask wearing in the mainstream media. This led her to be one of the academics who advised the WHO on adopting a mask recommendation. She has also written articles advocating for the importance of outdoor spaces, and encouraging beaches and parks to stay open during the Covid-19 pandemic.
