Sarah Jeong is an American journalist specializing in information technology law and other technology-related topics. A member of the editorial board of The New York Times from 2018 to 2019, she was formerly a senior writer for The Verge and a contributing editor for Vice's Motherboard website. She is the author of The Internet of Garbage, a non-fiction book about online harassment.
Early life and education
Jeong was born in South Korea in 1988. When she was three years old, her parents immigrated to New York as students and brought Sarah with them. Jeong attended a Southern Baptist high school near Los Angeles, later telling Willamette Week that the Internet helped her to counter religious dogmas of her upbringing such as creation science; "it's how I unbrainwashed myself", she said. Jeong studied philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and received a law degree from Harvard Law School, where she was editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. She received a green card while attending college and became a US citizen in 2017.
Career
Jeong writes on law, technology and internet culture. She is a former senior writer for The Verge and previously served as a contributing editor for Vice's Motherboard section, as well as writing articles for Forbes, The Guardian, and The New York Times. From 2014 to 2015 Jeong and Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins published an email newsletter called "5 Useful Articles" about copyright law and the Internet. In 2015, she covered the Silk Road trial for Forbes. Also in 2015, Jeong published The Internet of Garbage, a non-fiction book on the threat of online harassment and responses to it by media and online platforms. The book discusses active moderation and community management strategies to improve online interactions. In January 2016, Jeong posted a tweet caricaturing Bernie Sanders supporters in response to online attacks against women and Black Lives Matter advocates. A campaign harassing Jeong ensued that lasted for weeks and included threats of sexual violence; it drove her to make her Twitter account private and take an unpaid leave from her job at Motherboard. Jeong was a Yale University Poynter Fellow in Journalism in 2016. In 2017, Forbes named Jeong in its "30 Under 30" list for media. In August 2018, Jeong was hired by The New York Times to join its editorial board as lead writer on technology. The hiring sparked a strongly negative reaction in conservative media, which highlighted derogatory tweets about white people that Jeong had posted mostly in 2013 and 2014. Critics characterized her tweets as being racist; Jeong released an apology, saying that the tweets were meant to satirize online harassment toward her as a woman of color. Editors at The Verge defended Jeong, saying that the tweets had been disingenuously taken out of context and comparing the episode to the harassment of women during the Gamergate controversy. In August 2019, Jeong left The New York Timess editorial board, becoming an opinion columnist with the newspaper.
