Danielle Keats Citron is an American legal scholar who writes and teaches about privacy, free expression and civil rights. She is the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor of Law and Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she is the inaugural director of the LawTech Center (Source: law.virginia.edu). With Robert Chesney she wrote "Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security" (2019), the article that introduced the term liar's dividend (Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, California Law Review, 2019)).
Background and roles
Before joining UVA Law, Citron taught at the University of Maryland School of Law and Boston University School of Law (Source: law.virginia.edu). At the time the deep-fakes article was published in December 2019 she was Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, Vice President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project and an Affiliate Scholar of the Stanford Center on Internet and Society (Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, California Law Review, 2019)). The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit founded in 2013, is named after her article "Cyber Civil Rights" (89 B.U. L. Rev. 61 (2009)); she remains its vice president. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019 for her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy (Source: law.virginia.edu).
Her advisory roles have included serving as an adviser to then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris and on Harris's Task Force to Combat Cyber Exploitation and Violence Against Women (2014–2016); membership of Facebook's Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery Task Force (2018–2021); Twitter's Trust and Safety Council (2009–2022); advising TikTok (2020–2023) and Twitch (2024); the Safety Advisory Council of Spotify; and service as an adviser to the White House Gender Policy Council during the Biden administration (Source: law.virginia.edu). The deep-fakes article discloses her service on the Facebook task force advising on screening tools for non-consensually posted intimate images (Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, California Law Review, 2019)).
Her books are Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Harvard University Press, 2014) and The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age (W.W. Norton, 2022) (Source: law.virginia.edu).
Deep-fakes scholarship
The 2019 article, first circulated as an SSRN working paper in July 2018, surveys the harms of deep-fake audio and video and the limits of legal, technological and market responses, and names the liar's dividend: the benefit liars gain from a public primed to doubt authentic evidence as awareness of deep fakes grows (Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, California Law Review, 2019)). With Chesney she also published "Disinformation on Steroids: The Threat of Deep Fakes" (Council on Foreign Relations, October 16, 2018) and "Deep Fakes and the New Disinformation War" (Foreign Affairs, January 2019), and, with Chesney and Quinta Jurecic, "About That Pelosi Video: What to Do About 'Cheapfakes' in 2020" (Lawfare, May 19, 2019). In 2019 she testified twice before Congress on the national-security and privacy risks of deep fakes and on the Communications Decency Act, and gave a TED talk, "How Deepfakes Undermine Truth and Democracy," at the 2019 TED Global Summit (Source: law.virginia.edu).
Positions
Section 230
Citron has argued for narrowing the immunity of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In "The Internet Will Not Break: Denying Bad Samaritans § 230 Immunity" (86 Fordham L. Rev. 401 (2017)), written with Benjamin Wittes, she argued that law should incentivize platforms to address known illegality in a reasonable manner. The deep-fakes article builds on that work to propose that § 230(c)(1) protection "be conditional rather than automatic," available to platforms that take "reasonable steps" to ensure they are not used for illegal ends, with a sunset and data-gathering, damages caps, a federal anti-SLAPP provision and a notice-exhaustion requirement as safeguards (Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, California Law Review, 2019)). Her later writing on the subject includes "Fix Section 230 and hold tech companies to account" (Wired UK, May 6, 2021) (Source: law.virginia.edu).
Platform governance and technological due process
In "Technological Due Process" (85 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1249 (2008)) Citron developed the concept the deep-fakes article applies to platforms: transparent and specific speech rules, notice to users whose content is removed or muted with a meaningful opportunity to challenge the decision, and caution about exclusive reliance on automated filtering (Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, California Law Review, 2019)).
Non-consensual intimate imagery and sexual privacy
Her work on cyber harassment, non-consensual pornography and sexual privacy ("Sexual Privacy," 128 Yale L.J. 1870 (2019)) is cited in the article's treatment of deep-fake sex videos, which it argues will predominantly target women (Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, California Law Review, 2019)). The federal statutory response to AI-generated intimate imagery is documented at TAKE IT DOWN Act.
Relationships
- supports: Liar's Dividend — co-author of the article that introduced the term.
- supports: Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, California Law Review, 2019) — co-author.
- related: Robert Chesney — co-author of the deep-fakes article and related essays.
- related: Benjamin Wittes — co-author of the 2017 Section 230 proposal.
- related: Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) — proposes conditioning immunity on reasonable steps.
- related: Synthetic Media / Deepfakes, AI and Content Moderation, TAKE IT DOWN Act.