Zeynep Tufekci

Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist whose research and public writing concern social movements, digital platforms, and the political effects of computational systems. She holds the Henry G. Bryant Professorship of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and writes as a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times.

Academic Position

Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs lists her as the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs. The New York Times, in its own author-page description, likewise identifies her as “a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University.”

Her earlier position is documented by the Library of Congress name authority record for her, whose citation note transcribes the jacket of her 2017 book: at that point she was an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The Atlantic’s author page still carries that UNC description, which is a useful marker of when the page was written rather than a statement of her current post.

Twitter and Tear Gas

Her book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest was published by Yale University Press in 2017. The book examines how networked communication changes the way protest movements form, scale, and are contested. The full text is available at no charge from the author’s site under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, alongside the commercial editions.

On the same site she describes growing up in Istanbul and beginning her career as a programmer before moving into social science out of an interest in the social effects of technology.

Research and Writing

Her peer-reviewed work sits at the intersection of communication research and sociology. With Christopher Wilson she published “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square” in the Journal of Communication in 2012. In 2014 she published “Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics” in First Monday, on the use of large-scale behavioural data in political persuasion.

She writes for a general audience as a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times and as a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her 2018 New York Times opinion piece on YouTube’s recommendation system is one entry point through which the argument about algorithmic amplification entered mainstream political debate; the research literature that followed it does not settle the question, and this site treats that dispute on its own page rather than here.

What Is Not Established Here

This page previously carried no citations at all and was marked a stub. Several things asserted or implied by earlier drafts have been left off for want of a source this audit could read:

• No employment date ranges. No span such as “at UNC from X to Y” or “at Columbia from X to Y” appears here, because no first-party record confirming those dates could be retrieved. Princeton’s departmental pages, its AI and Society Lab, its Center for Information Technology Policy and research.princeton.edu all refused automated clients, and the Internet Archive returned HTTP 429 throughout this session, so a Columbia University faculty page capture could not be read. Reporting that she moved from Columbia to Princeton exists, but this page states only the position Princeton itself currently publishes.
• No birth year. The Library of Congress name authority record for her carries none, and no other first-party record giving one was reached.
• No awards. A 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist citation for commentary is widely reported, but pulitzer.org returns a Cloudflare challenge to every client tried, and the claim is not asserted here without the awarding body’s own record.
• No follower counts or platform list. No follower figure was obtainable from any platform, and none is stated.
• No characterization of her views. Her columns are described by venue and subject; no political label is applied to her, and no position is attributed to her that is not on a source read here.