Hossein Derakhshan
Hossein Derakhshan
Research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center
Hossein Derakhshan is an Iranian-Canadian writer and researcher, and a pioneer of blogging, podcasts and tech journalism in Iran. He is a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and a research associate at the MIT Media Lab. He co-authored the report Information Disorder, commissioned by the Council of Europe, on the theory and practice of what is known as ‘fake news’.
He spent six years in prison in Iran from 2008, which inspired an essay on the demise of blogs and “The Web We Have to Save” (Matter, 2015). His current research is focused on the future of journalism and also on the theory and socio-political implications of digital and social media. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Wired, Libération, Die Zeit, and Corriere Della Sera.