Rebecca MacKinnon

Rebecca MacKinnon is a writer, researcher and advocate for human rights in digital environments, currently a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She built her career on a single question: who controls the infrastructure that people depend on to speak, learn and organize, and what do those controllers owe the public? Her 2012 book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, argued that whoever shapes how a network is structured, governed and used must earn the consent of the people who live inside it. That argument is the direct ancestor of the case for publicly owned AI compute — infrastructure accountable to Californians rather than to the handful of firms that currently own it.

MacKinnon joined the Berkman Klein Center as a fellow in March 2026, part of a multidisciplinary cohort working on how AI is designed, used and governed. She is leading conversations and writing about the future of freedom and democracy in the age of AI, and has begun work on a sequel to Consent of the Networked. In January 2026 she also became a principal at Freeman & MacKinnon LLC in San Francisco, advising nonprofits, foundations, investors and companies on human rights and support for civic space in partnership with Bennett Freeman.

From September 2021 to June 2025 she served as the Wikimedia Foundation’s first vice president for global advocacy, building and leading the public policy team defending the legal and regulatory conditions that free knowledge depends on worldwide; she continued as special adviser for global advocacy through December 2025. She had earlier served on the Wikimedia Foundation’s inaugural Advisory Board from 2007 to 2012. Before Wikimedia she founded and directed Ranking Digital Rights, the research program she launched at New America in 2013 and led until 2021, which ranks the world’s most powerful internet, mobile and telecommunications companies against international human rights standards. The RDR Corporate Accountability Index turned an abstract argument about platform power into a measurable, comparable benchmark that advocates, investors and regulators still use.

Her institutional work in the field runs deep. In 2004 she co-founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman while a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and she remains on its board after chairing it from 2012 to 2015. She was a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative, the multistakeholder body created to protect free expression and privacy in the technology sector, and served on its board from 2009 to 2014. She sat on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists for 13 years, from 2009 to 2022, and on the board of the Tor Project from 2006 to 2008. She has taught at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she led an interdisciplinary project on new technologies, human rights and transparency at the Annenberg School and co-taught a seminar on human rights, corporate responsibility and information technology at Penn Law.

MacKinnon has a direct tie to the University of California. She was a 2019–20 fellow with the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, on a project titled “From Campus to the Global Internet: Reclaiming Free Speech for Democracy and Human Rights in a Digitally Interconnected World,” with a residency at UC Irvine in February 2020 in collaboration with Prof. David Kaye, the former United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression.

Her first career was in journalism. She spent nearly 12 years at CNN, joining the Beijing bureau in 1992 as an entry-level assistant and working up through every producing and reporting job there to become Beijing bureau chief in 1998, then Tokyo bureau chief from 2001 to 2004. She covered China, North and South Korea and the wider region, and reported from Peshawar, Pakistan for nearly two months after Sept. 11, 2001. She holds an AB in government, magna cum laude, from Harvard University, was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan and speaks Mandarin Chinese. Consent of the Networked won the 2013 Goldsmith Book Prize.

Rebecca MacKinnon is based in San Francisco. Across three decades of reporting, research and advocacy she has made the same argument in different registers — that the people who depend on a technical system deserve a say in how it is governed. CalCompute is that argument applied to the compute layer.