Jon is a legal academic and social scientist who does research at the intersection of law, technology, and human rights, with strong interdisciplinary and empirical dimensions.
In addition to being an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, he is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School; a long time Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy; and in Fall 2020, he will be joining the Faculty of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.
A native of Halifax, Canada, he studied law at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford University as a Mackenzie King Scholar. He holds a doctorate in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (Balliol College, 2016). More recently, he spent time research disinformation and media manipulation as a Senior Research Fellow on the Technology and Social Change Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and, before that, spent time as a Research Affiliate of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
As an BKC affiliate, he will work on projects involving chilling effects theory and research, adversarial machine learning, and the role of emerging technologies in public and private sector surveillance, content moderation, disinformation, and other corporate and governmental processes. This includes, among other projects, research with Danielle Citron, funded by the Knight Foundation, exploring how laws and other measures taken to battle online abuse, including intimate privacy protections, can empower the online speech and engagement of victims. As well, he is completing a book on chilling effects, forthcoming in Cambridge University Press (2020), which explores the impact of surveillance, legal automation, and other digital/technological threats.
