Sarah Gilbert

Sarah Gilbert is a researcher who studies online community moderation, with a particular focus on the volunteer labour that sustains Reddit. She is the research director of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University. She earned her PhD in Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia and previously held a postdoctoral position at the University of Maryland.

Gilbert's work uses qualitative methods, including interviews and ethnography, to examine how online communities are governed by unpaid moderators and how that labour is often demanding yet largely unrecognised. Her widely read Reddit case study, 'Moderating a Public Scholarship Site on Reddit: A Case Study of r/AskHistorians,' published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, documents how that subreddit operates as a large-scale public-history project and the moderation practices that make rigorous public scholarship possible at scale.

During the June 2023 protests over Reddit's API-pricing changes, Gilbert became a frequently quoted expert. Through outlets including the Cornell Chronicle, she offered analysis of the tension between Reddit's commercial and data interests and the volunteer moderators and users whose unpaid work keeps communities running, connecting the blackout directly to her research on moderator collective action.

Her broader research program addresses how communities sustain themselves, the visibility and invisibility of moderation work, and the conditions under which moderators organise against platform decisions. Gilbert is one of the scholars most associated with documenting the human cost of keeping large Reddit communities functional.