Dr. Carolina Are is an Innovation Fellow researching on the intersection between online abuse and censorship. Her research on social media moderation, platform governance and algorithm bias has been published in Porn Studies, First Monday, Journalism and Feminist Media Studies, in which she authored the first academic study on the shadowbanning of pole dancing. Dr Are's work has been featured in the BBC, MIT Technology Review, Business Insider, Vice, Wired and Mashable, as well as in a series of bestselling books. She is also a blogger and creator herself, as well as a writer, pole dance instructor and award-winning activist.

Dr Carolina Are's first ongoing project at the CDC 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. In absence of social media platforms’ communications or transparency about their moderation processes, her two-year study aims to infer Instagram and TikTok’s approach to moderating grey area content by focusing on user experience.