Speaking Freely: Rebecca MacKinnon

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca MacKinnon is Vice President, Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia. Author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (2012), she is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, and  founding director of Ranking Digital Rights, a research and advocacy program at New America. From 1998-2004 she was CNN’s Bureau Chief in Beijing and Tokyo. She has taught at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Pennsylvania, and held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of California. She holds an AB magna cum laude in Government from Harvard and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan.

David Greene: Can you introduce yourself and give us a bit of your background? 

My name is Rebecca MacKinnon, I am presently the Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, but I’ve worn quite a number of hats working in the digital rights space for almost twenty years. I was co-founder of Global Voices, which at the time we called it International Bloggers’ Network, which is about to hit its twentieth anniversary. I was one of the founding board members of the Global Networking Initiative, GNI. I wrote a book called “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom,” which came out more than a decade ago. It didn’t sell very well, but apparently it gets assigned in classes still so I still hear about it. I was also a founding member of Ranking Digital Rights, which is a ranking of the big tech companies and the biggest telecommunications companies on the extent to which they are or are not protecting their users’ freedom of expression and privacy. I left that in 2021 and ended up with the Wikimedia Foundation, and it’s never a dull moment! 

Greene: And you were a journalist before all of this, right? 

Yes, I worked for CNN for twelve years in Beijing for nine years where I ended up Bureau Chief and Correspondent, and in Tokyo for almost three years where I was also Bureau Chief and Correspondent. That’s also where I first experienced the magic of the global internet in a journalistic context and also experienced the internet arriving in China and the government immediately trying to figure out both how to take advantage of it economically but also to control it enough that the Communist Party would not lose power. 

Greene: At what point did it become apparent that the internet would bring both benefits and threats to freedom of expression?

At the beginning I think the media, industry, policymakers, kind of everybody, assumed—you know, this is like in 1995 when the internet first showed up commercially in China—everybody assumed “there’s no way the Chinese Communist Party can survive this,” and we were all a bit naive. And our reporting ended up influencing naive policies in that regard. And perhaps naive understanding of things like Facebook revolutions and things like that in the activism world. It really began to be apparent just how authoritarianism was adapting to the internet and starting to adapt the internet. And how China was really Exhibit A for how that was playing out and could play out globally. That became really apparent in the mid-to-late 2000s as I was studying Chinese blogging communities and how the government was controlling private companies, private platforms, to carry out censorship and surveillance work. 

Greene: And it didn’t stop with China, did it? 

It sure didn’t! And in the book I wrote I only had a chapter on China and talked about how if the trajectory the Western democratic world was on just kind of continued in a straight line we were going to go more in China’s direction unless policymakers, the private sector, and everyone else took responsibility for making sure that the internet would actually support human rights. 

Greene: It’s easy to talk about authoritarian threats, but we see some of the same concerns in democratic countries as well. 

We’re all just one bad election away from tyranny, aren’t we? This is again why when we’re talking to lawmakers, not only do we ask them to apply a Wikipedia test—if t