Rebecca MacKinnon (born September 16, 1969) is an American author, researcher, and Internet freedom advocate, and the co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices. She is notable as a former CNNjournalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists,[1] a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative[2] the founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, and is the Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation.
MacKinnon was born in Berkeley, California. When she was three years old, MacKinnon's family moved to Tempe, Arizona, where her father, Stephen R. MacKinnon, had taken a job as Professor of Chinese History at Arizona State University. Her parents' academic research careers led her to pass most of her primary school years in Delhi, India, Hong Kong, and Beijing, China, before moving back to Arizona for middle and high school. She graduated from Tempe High in 1987.
MacKinnon joined CNN in 1992 as Beijing Bureau Assistant and moved up to Producer/Correspondent by 1997 and Bureau Chief by 1998.[3] In 2001 she became Tokyo Bureau Chief. During her time with CNN, she interviewed notable leaders including Junichiro Koizumi, Dalai Lama, Pervez Musharraf, and Mohammad Khatami.
In September 2010, MacKinnon became a Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation.[11] She is the Founding Director of the think tank's Ranking Digital Rights project which ranks the world's most powerful Internet, mobile, and telecommunications, companies on their respect for users' rights, with a focus on free expression and privacy.
Wikimedia
In January 2007, MacKinnon joined the inaugural Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board,[12] where she remained until December 2012.[13]
MacKinnon at SXSW 2025
In September 2021, MacKinnon joined the Foundation as its inaugural Vice President of Global Advocacy;[14] she was compensated $290,118 in 2024 and $276,218 in 2023 for her role.[15]
We cannot assume that the Internet will evolve automatically in a direction that is going to be compatible with democracy. It depends on how the technology is structured, governed, and used. Governments and corporations are working actively to shape the Internet to fit their own needs. The most insidious situations arise when both government and corporations combine their efforts to exercise power over the same people at the same time, in largely unconstrained and unaccountable ways. This is why I argue that if we the people do not wake up and fight for the protection of our own rights and interests on the Internet, we should not be surprised to wake up one day to find that they have been programmed, legislated, and sold away.
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