Margaret Roberts

Margaret Roberts is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. She co-directs the China Data Lab at the 21st Century China Center and is an aCiliate at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

Her research interests lie in the intersection of political methodology and the politics of information, with a specific focus on methods of automated content analysis and the politics of censorship and propaganda in China. Roberts received a PhD from Harvard in Government (2014), MS from Stanford in Statistics (2009) and BA from Stanford in International Relations and Economics (2009). Much of her research uses social media, online experiments, and large collections of texts to understand the influence of censorship and propaganda on access to information and beliefs about politics.

Her first book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, was listed as one of the Foreign ACairs Best Books of 2018, was honored with the Goldsmith Book Award, the Best Book Award in the Human Rights Section and the Best Book Award in the Information Technology and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. She is the recipient of the 2022 Max Planck-Humboldt Award and holds a Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair at UCSD.