About Nathalie

Dr. Nathalie Maréchal is a writer, researcher and activist working at the intersection of internet policy and human rights advocacy, committed to fighting for democracy in the face of networked authoritarianism.

Nathalie currently works as Co-Director of the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). She also sits on the Board of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research.

Before joining CDT in January 2023, she was the Policy Director at Ranking Digital Rights, an independent research program at the policy think tank New America that promotes freedom of expression and privacy on the internet by creating global standards and incentives for companies to respect and protect users’ rights.

In 2020, Nathalie was the lead author for RDR’s “It’s the Business Model” report series, which builds on her 2018 Motherboard op-ed, “Targeted Advertising is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World,” to argue that disinformation, hate speech, and other “information harms” associated social media platforms are rooted in the surveillance capitalism business model. The report series calls on governments to focus reform efforts on data protection and corporate governance, rather than attempting to regulate online speech.

Prior to RDR, her scholarship focused on the convergence of classical authoritarianism and surveillance capitalism, giving rise to networked authoritarianism, a political system that leverages ICTs and media regulation to carefully control the expression of dissent in a way that gives the impression of limited freedom of expression without allowing dissent to gain traction, with grave implications for democracy and human rights.

In 2018, Nathalie received her PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her dissertation, “‘Use Signal, Use Tor’ ? : The Political Economy of Digital Rights Technology,” examined the relationship between the transnational social movement for human rights online and the US Internet Freedom Agenda through an ethnography of the “freedom technologists” behind popular secure messaging applications (Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram) and censorship circumvention software (Tor, Psiphon). She hopes to publish this work in some form, eventually.

Fluent in French and Spanish, Nathalie has been a frequent speaker at digital rights events and academic conferences around the world (and now, on Zoom). Her work has been published by the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Democracy, the Global Commission on Internet Governance, Media and Communication, Global Voices, Motherboard, and Slate.  Nathalie lives in Washington, DC.