Rebecca MacKinnon is an independent writer, researcher, and advocate for digital rights. Until August 2026 she is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Previously, she was Vice President, Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. Prior to that she was the founding director of Ranking Digital Rights, a non-profit research organization whose Corporate Accountability Index evaluates the world’s most powerful digital platforms and telecommunications companies on their respect for users’ human rights, especially privacy and freedom of expression.
Author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012) MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and was a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative.
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief from 1998-2001 and Tokyo Bureau Chief from 2001-2003. Since leaving CNN in 2004 she he has held fellowships at the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Publicy Policy, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Foundations , Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, and New America. In 2007-08 she taught online journalism and conducted research on Chinese Internet censorship at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, and was a 2013 adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan.
(2011 Photo credit: Brooke Bready)
Last updated: June 2026
Consent of the Networked 
[…] this powerful talk from TEDGlobal (video below), Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design […]