Julia Angwin

Senior Reporter

Photo of Julia Angwin

Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010. Her book "Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance," was published by Times Books in 2014, and was shortlisted for Best Business Book of the Year by the Financial Times.

Also in 2014, Julia was named reporter of the year by the Newswomenâs Club of New York. In 2003, she was on a team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for coverage of corporate corruption. She is also the author of âStealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in Americaâ (Random House, March 2009). She earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.

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Updated: Facebook Political Ad Collector

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Congressman’s Bill Would Force Trump Administration to Fulfill Pledge to Study Racial Disparities in Auto Insurance Pricing

Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., cited our report that minority neighborhoods pay higher car insurance premiums than white areas with the same risk.

What Does Facebook Consider Hate Speech?

Our analysis shows that Facebook’s content reviewers often make different calls on whether to allow or delete items with similar content. See the inconsistencies.

Facebook’s Uneven Enforcement of Hate Speech Rules Allows Vile Posts to Stay Up

We asked Facebook about its handling of 49 posts that might be deemed offensive. The company acknowledged that its content reviewers had made the wrong call on 22 of them.

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Among the companies we found doing it: Amazon, Verizon, UPS and Facebook itself. “It’s blatantly unlawful,” said one employment law expert.

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How We Are Monitoring Political Ads on Facebook

ProPublica built software and a machine-learning algorithm to allow Facebook users to send us the political ads that appear on their Facebook news feeds.

Political Ads on Facebook

To make American campaigns more transparent, we’ve built a tool to display political ads that are rarely seen outside their selected audience of Facebook users.

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Facebook to Temporarily Block Advertisers From Excluding Audiences by Race

The social network’s actions come after a ProPublica investigation revealed that Facebook failed to keep its promise to reject discriminatory housing ads.

Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

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German Political Ads Collected From Facebook

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The short answer: It leaves the company some wiggle room.

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After being contacted by ProPublica, Facebook removed several anti-Semitic ad categories and promised to improve monitoring.

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