About Us

Dr. Rebekah Tromble is Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics and Associate Professor in the School of Media & Public Affairs at George Washington University. Her research focuses on political communication, digital research methodology, and research ethics, with particular interests in political discourse on social media, as well as the impacts of exposure to toxic and abusive content. Dr. Tromble is currently leading Expert Voices Together, an interdisciplinary, cross-sector project funded by the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program to develop a rapid response system in support of journalists, scientists, public health officials, and other experts facing campaigns of online harassment. Dr. Tromble consults regularly for industry and policymakers, particularly on topics of digital platform accountability, transparency, and responsible data access and use. She is also a member of the European Digital Media Observatory’s Advisory Board, where she serves as Chair of the multi-stakeholder Working Group on Platform Data Access.

Alex Abdo is the inaugural litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, where he has litigated cases designed to promote a system of free expression that is open and inclusive, that broadens and elevates public discourse, and that fosters creativity, accountability, and effective self-government. Particularly relevant to his membership in the Coalition, he has represented journalists and researchers whose work would illuminate the influence that the social media platforms are having on society, but who fear legal liability for relying on investigative methods that the platforms view as violating their terms of service. Prior to joining the Knight Institute, Abdo worked for eight years at the ACLU, where he litigated cases relating to NSA surveillance, encryption, anonymous speech online, government transparency, and the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in US custody.

David Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, and Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, Organization Science, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News.

He is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation and computational social science and has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial boards and program committees.

James Mickens is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed systems. Prior to becoming a professor at Harvard, Dr. Mickens spent seven years at Microsoft Research; he was also a visiting professor at MIT. At Harvard, he serves on the Board of Directors for the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; he is also a Faculty Director for the Institute for Rebooting Social Media.

Ethan Zuckerman is Associate Professor of Public Policy, Information and Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2021) and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013). With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. It showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages, publishing editions in 20 languages. Previously, Zuckerman directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT and taught at the MIT Media Lab. In 2000, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer organization that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Previously, he helped found Tripod.com, one of the web’s first “personal publishing” sites. He and his family live in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts.