Julia Angwin

@juliaangwin.com

41632 Followers 757 Following

Pre-order: ON COURAGE: HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT IN AN AGE OF FEAR (6/30 HarperCollins) tinyurl.com/yxpvn488 NYTimes Opinion Writer | Director, Independent Media program HKS Sign up for my newsletter: https://buttondown.com/JuliaAngwin

Atlanta Book Event -- The Carter Center. Ami Fields-Meyer and Julia Angwin. Wednesday July 15 6:00 pm. 453 John Lewis Freedom Parkway NE.

July 7 - Porter Square Books, Boston MA
July 8 - P&T Knitwear, New York City NY
July 9 - Politics and Prose, Washington DC
July 15 - The Carter Center, Atlanta GA

Julia Angwin speaking at Porter Square Books, next to moderator Samantha Power.

Clip from Rachel Maddow segment about "On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear."

A photo of the book cover for On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer.

Authoritarians traffic in lies. You can fight back by keeping track of the truth.

Video of Moxi the robot and nurse Atalia Lapkin talking about her experiences with it.

A video of Julia Angwin, founder of Proof, talking about why we are reporting on AI in the workplace.

Headline of an article in the Washington State Nurses Association newsletter.
Lead Image of a robot next to "Rest in Peace."
Headline below the robot: "Saying goodbye to Moxi, the AI-powered robot. The robot is survived by human nurses in comfortable shoes."

To the Editor:
Re "Angry Users. Runaway Expenses. Meta Is Dying," by Julia Angwin (Opinion guest essay, May 11):
Since Facebook's early days, people have been eager to write the company's obituary.
In 2014, a set of Princeton researchers predicted that 80 percent of the platform's user base would disappear by 2017. They were wrong, and Julia Angwin is, too.
For well over a decade, Ms. Angwin has levied relentless criticism against Facebook or Meta, some of it in this newspaper. And now she offers a reductive hot take that fails to account for facts like the 4 percent year-over-year increase in the number of people who use Meta's services daily or Meta's 33 percent revenue growth in the same period.
Times readers deserve better.
David Ginsberg
Washington
The writer is the vice president for global communications and public affairs at Meta.

Audio book listing for "On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear," noting 12 hours listening length and narrator Rachel Maddow.

A website that is blank but just says "no healthy upstream."

Julia Angwin, Marisa Kabas, Tara Palmeri and Memo Torres on stage at International Journalism Festival.

Photo of Memo Torres of LA Taco, Julia Angwin of Harvard Independent Media +Audience Project, Marisa Kabas of the Handbasket and Tara Palmeri of the Red Letter and Tara Palmeri show standing in an ancient church.

Advance reader copies of On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear

Barnes & Noble Pre-Order Sale of On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. March 24-26. Use code PREORDER25 for 25% off pre-orders including print, ebooks and audio books. Online only. B&N Premium and Rewards Members only.

Early reader copies of On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear

Even worse was the suggestion by Grammarly’s A.I. version of me to replace the first sentence of the news article with an anecdotal opening describing a fictional person named Laura whose privacy had been violated.

“Laura, a patient searching for relief from a chronic condition, clicks through her hospital’s website to schedule an appointment. In just a few moments, her most private medical details — her reason for visiting, her doctor’s name and even the treatment she seeks — are quietly sent to Facebook, without her knowledge,” the bot suggested with a button allowing the user to paste that excerpt straight into the article.

Replacing a factual sentence with an imagined story about a person who doesn’t exist is not only bad editing. It’s a deception that could end my career as a journalist (or the career of any journalist who took that terrible advice).

Update on Angwin v. Superhuman Litigation
Since Julia Angwin filed a class action lawsuit over Grammarly’s Expert Review tool on March 11, 2026, Angwin v. Superhuman Platform, Inc., No. 26 Civ. 02005-JGK (S.D.N.Y.), Julia and her counsel at Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC have heard from many people who are rightly concerned that their names and identities were used by Grammarly or may have been used for commercial purposes without their consent. We appreciate all the interest and enthusiasm that this case has generated. We want to underscore that the case was filed as a class action lawsuit so that Julia and her lawyers can seek relief for all of the people in the United States whose names or identities used by Grammarly’s Expert Review tool (the Class Members), and in this litigation we plan to ask the Court to certify a nationwide class that includes all of those Class Members. Typically, when a court certifies a class action under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the class members do not need to do anything to remain in the class, but they are allowed to “opt out” of the class if they don’t want to be a part of it.In the discovery process in this litigation, we will ask Grammarly’s owner, Superhuman, to identify all the people who were included in its Expert Review Tool so that, at the appropriate time, those people can be notified that they are members of the Class.
Anyone who thinks they may be a class member of the proposed Class can contact Peter Romer-Friedman Law at info@prf-law.com to make sure we have your contact information, and we are happy to answer any questions that you may have about the case. At this time, however, you do not need to take any action to join the Angwin case to be included as a member of the proposed Class. (At the same time, we recommend against entering into any agreement with Grammarly, as Grammarly might claim that by doing so you’ve waived your rights in this case).

Screen shot from Grammarly listing "expert suggestions" from Julia Angwin, Craig Silverman, Bruce Schneier and Julie Brill

Screenshot of Washington Post subscription cancellation confirmation

Screenshot of the Washington Post Guild GoFundMe page with generous donations listed.

Email from Donnie T to Julia Angwin: best weapon against ICE is not a phone libtard, it’s getting rid of all the ILIEGALS [sic] that were let in to crash the country down while you munch on a rug. Silly cow.

David Brin’s “The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?” was so prescient. Published in 1999, Brin foretold the exact dilemma posed by the prevalence of powerful cameras available to everyone. If we restrict the cameras to government control, he argued, we will live in a police state. If we allow everyone to have cameras, we will at least be able to counter-surveil the government and maintain an equilibrium of power.

For everyone wringing their hands about banning kids from using smartphones, I suggest reading this book and imagining what our lives would be like right now if we didn’t have the ability to film federal agents as they unleash weapons on our unarmed neighbors who have committed no crimes.

Publishers Marketplace announcement: Pulitzer Prize-winning NYT contributing Opinion writer Julia Angwin and former White House senior policy advisor Ami Fields-Meyer’s ON COURAGE: TO BE A DISSIDENT IN AMERICA"S AGE OF FEAR, a guide to confronting fear, taking risk, and being courageous in our new age of authoritarianism, which expands on The New Yorker essay, “So You Want to Be a Dissident?: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump's Age of Fear,” through new interviews with dissidents, opposition leaders, theorists, and movement strategists across the world, to Peter Hubbard at Mariner, for publication in summer 2026, by Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic (world English).

A centralized database will be "ill-equipped to correct errors, allow for extenuating circumstances, or bring facts up to date," warned Vance Packard. "The notion of the possibility of redemption is likely to be incomprehensible to a computer."

Picture of the front page of the New York Times on January 7, 1968. At the bottom of the page, below news of the escalating Vietnam war and Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential ambitions, is an article titled "Data Bank: Peril or Aid?"

BuzzFeed news began its investigation after devising an algorithm to analyze gambling on professional tennis matches over the past seven years. It identified 15 players who regularly lost matches in which heavily lopsided betting appeared to substantially shift the odds - a red flag for possible match-fixing.

Bluesky alt text score of 54.17% for my posts on Bluesky.

Quote from a New York Times article calling Trump’s proposed TikTok remedy “lawless.”

Screenshot of TikTok with message: TikTok is temporarily unavailable. We’re working hard to resolve this issue. Thank you for your patience.

Pew Research chart of news influencer political affiliations by social media platform, with TikTok being the only place where left leaning influencers are more prevalent than right leaning.

A colorful "sticker" showing a cartoon dog yelling with flames behind him. Sounds creepier than it is.

Photo of my Concord grape pie straight out of the oven.

Inaccuracy rates for leading AI models in English and Spanish.
Claude - 40% in English, 52% in Spanish
Gemini - 52% in English, 48% in Spanish
GPT 4 - 28% in English, 32% in Spanish
Llama - 48% in English, 64% in Spanish
Mixtral - 48% in English, 64% in Spanish

Front page of the international edition of the New York Times with my Opinion piece in the first column.

Email from Zoom that says "Hi, you are receiving this email as you were mentioned in a recent meeting."

A remix of Shakespeare’s Marc Antony speech at Julius Caesar’s funeral, but with references to Brutus changed to Zuck.

Picture of Julia Angwin with an I Voted sticker on her t-shirt.

Picture of Albertine Villa bookstore in NYC with beautiful wooden shelves and a ceiling painted with a blue and gold depiction of the solar system.

Bottom half of photo is clouds, topped with a strip of sunlight and top half is darkening sky.

A chart showing 80% of voters are For the TikTok ban and 20% against.

An illustration of a grenade composed of angry emoji faces attached to a lit fuse