Speaking Freely: Dr. Carolina Are

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Dr. Carolina Are is an Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University Centre for Digital Citizens. Her research primarily focuses on the intersection between online abuse and censorship. Her current research project investigates Instagram and TikTok’s approach to malicious flagging against ‘grey area’ content, or content that toes the line of compliance with social media’s community guidelines.

She is also a blogger and creator herself, as well as a writer, pole dance instructor and award-winning activist. Dr. Are sat down for an interview with EFF’s Jillian York to discuss the impact of platform censorship on sex workers and activist communities, the need for systemic change around content moderation, and how there’s hope to be found in the younger generations. 

Jillian York: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your work? Specifically, can you give us an idea of how you became a free speech advocate?

Dr. Carolina Are: Sure, I’m Carolina Are, I’m an Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University Centre for Digital Citizens and I mainly focus on deplatforming, online censorship, and platform governance of speech but also bodies, nudity, and sex work.

I came to it from a pretty personal and selfish perspective, in the sense that I was doing my PhD on the moderation of online abuse and conspiracy theories while also doing pole dance as a hobby. At the time my social media accounts were separate because I still didn’t know how I wanted to present to academia. So I had a pole dance account on Instagram and an academic account on Twitter. This was around the time when FOSTA/ SESTA was approved in the US. In 2019, Instagram started heavily shadow banning– algorithmically demoting – poledancers’ content. And I was in a really unique position to be observing the moderation of stuff that wasn’t actually getting moderated and should have been getting moderated – it wa

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