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PRIVACY EXPERT DANIELLE CITRON JOINS FACULTY DANIELLE CITRON, a pioneering law professor in digital privacy who helped Vice President Kamala Harris in her effort to combat nonconsensual pornography as an attorney general, joined the Law School faculty in December. Citron, the inaugural Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law, comes to UVA from the Boston University School of Law. Her professorship is funded by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. “The work that Danielle Citron is doing on digital privacy has been truly groundbreaking,” Dean Risa Goluboff said. “It is no exaggeration to say that she has built a field.” Citron was a recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, informally known as a genius grant, for her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy, including her efforts to change how the public thinks about online harassment, from a triviality to a civil rights problem. Because women and minority groups are often targeted online, she has made the argument that civil rights law—which can address harms not covered by other laws— could be applied in many cases and would serve “a crucial expressive role.” “Law would teach us that cyberstalking deprives women and marginalized communities of crucial opportunities to work, speak and go to school,” she said. “Regrettably, the United States is as bad as some of the worst countries.” Citron helped found the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative in 2013, a name inspired by her foundational paper. She has
focused her legislative efforts on a multitude of privacy issues in the online environment. Among them is what has been called “revenge porn,” although she and her colleagues at the nonprofit, of which she is the vice president, prefer to reframe the problem as “nonconsensual pornography” in order to emphasize the harm done. Harvard University Press published her book “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace” in 2014. The book was hailed as a “call to action and a thought-provoking roadmap” by Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, and as a “lucid summary” that shows “we can do quite a lot for victims of cyberabuse without chilling expression” by University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum. Cosmopolitan magazine named the book one of the “20 Best Moments for Women” that year. Through staffers, the book also got the attention of then-Attorney General of California Kamala Harris. Citron ended up advising Harris and her team for two years, and during a portion of that time, served on the Attorney General’s Cyber Exploitation Task Force. The task force “had a series of meetings, and the first was in person with 50 companies, like everyone in Silicon Valley,” Citron said. “A lot of them didn’t necessarily want to be there, but they came. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, you name it.” In direct and indirect ways, the tech giants were enabling nonconsensual pornography, she said. However, because of Section 230 of
the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996, which was the first major attempt by Congress to regulate internet pornography, Harris’ office couldn’t pursue action against the tech companies for serving as intermediaries. Courts have interpreted the section as meaning operators of internet services cannot be held liable for what third parties post. Citron gave a presentation on how the companies’ reticence to act affected the lives of victims. Google, for example, had a handsoff approach related to its search engine and what content would appear in searches of individuals’ names, such as nonconsensual porn. For those instances in which extortion charges couldn’t be brought, the Harris team and their allies ultimately sought a way that the content could be taken down or de-listed. By the summer of 2015, Google announced that it would de-index nonconsensual porn in searches of people’s names when requested by the affected individual, as did Bing. “I almost fell over in my chair,” Citron said of receiving the news from a USA Today tech reporter. “So I credit the AG, now our vice president, with changing the landscape entirely.” In addition to her past service to Harris, Citron has been a member of Facebook’s NonConsensual Intimate Imagery Task Force since 2011, and an adviser and a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Task Force since 2009. —Eric Williamson
Spring 2021 | UVA LAW Y ER
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