Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), Germany, and founder of the Center for Digital Dignity, an international network of researchers, policymakers and civil society groups to collaboratively imagine and foster enabling spaces of political expression online.
She has published widely on online extreme speech, disinformation, content moderation, decoloniality, digital cultures, and platform governance. In a commissioned research paper for the United Nations, “Digital technology and extreme speech: Approaches to counter online hate”, she highlighted global challenges in platform governance and conceptual problems surrounding vitriolic exchange and unverified content circulating on social media. In 2024, the article, “Ethical scaling: Extreme speech and the (in)significance of artificial intelligence” published in Big Data and Society, which she co-authored with Antonis Maronikolakis and Axel Wisiorek, won the International Communication Association Outstanding Article Award.
Udupa is the recipient of Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School, Francqui Chair in Belgium, and European Research Council (ERC) grants. She is currently setting up a cross-national study on contentious speech on small social media platforms (2024-2029) funded by a new ERC consolidator grant (2M euros). She is also steering an international research group on encrypted messaging and extreme speech at the LMU Center for Advanced Studies, which will soon launch a co-edited book on WhatsApp (New York University Press, with Herman Wasserman). A Fellow of the International Communication Association, she serves on the advisory board of MediaWell at the Social Science Research Council, as well as the editorial boards of several journals.