Defending Digital Rights - Rebecca MacKinnon & Molly Roberts

Rebecca MacKinnon is the director of Ranking Digital Rights, a program at New America promotes freedom of expression and privacy on the internet by creating global standards and incentives for companies to respect and protect users’ rights. She was a Pacific Leadership Fellow at the Center for Global Transformation at UC San Diego School of Global Policy & Strategy.

Ms. MacKinnon is the author of the book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom and the co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices.

Ms. MacKinnon was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief from 1998-2001 and Tokyo Bureau Chief from 2001-2003. Since leaving CNN, she taught journalism and conducted research on Chinese censorship at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Molly Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego and the director of the China Data Lab at the 21st Century China Center. Prof. Roberts uses social media, online experiments, and large collections of newspaper articles to understand the influence of censorship and propaganda on the spread of information in China. She is the author of the award-winning book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall.

Editor/Host: Samuel Tsoi

Music: Shanghai Restoration Project
Illustration: Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University