Rebecca MacKinnon

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 CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She was on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists from 2009 to 2022, a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative through 2014, the founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, and was Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation until late 2025. Since the start of 2026, she has been offering strategic consultancy and has returned to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as a research fellow; she has sat as an appointed member of the board of Wikimedia Europe since 2022 and, as of September 2026, is interim board secretary for Global Voices since its registration as a Netherlands non-profit in January 2026.