Robyn Caplan
Assistant Professor of Technology Policy, Duke University
I study how digital platforms govern public life, focusing on platform governance, media institutions, and the politics of identity and verification.
Current Research
Checkmarked: The Politics and Power of Online Verification
Book in Progress ยท University of California Press
Online verification is often treated as a matter of identity: confirming that an organization or an account is who or what it claims to be. But verification is also a system of ranking and recognition, reinforcing existing hierarchies of authority and status while creating new distinctions between people and institutions (and increasingly, bots). Checkmarked traces the history of identity verification on the internet, examining how changing ideas about identity, trust, and authenticity shaped the development of online spaces and how they are governed.