Sarah McLaughlin
FIRE Staff Speaker
Sarah graduated magna cum laude from Drexel University in 2014 with a B.S. in political science and a minor in history. She is Senior Scholar, Global Expression at FIRE and analyzes the relationship between free expression in the United States and global censorship. She is also the author of the book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025.) Her writing about global free speech issues has been featured in publications including Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, MSNBC, Times Higher Education, and The Los Angeles Times.
Recent Writings
- Northern Ireland to consider abolishing blasphemy law,
- Hamit Coskun wins Quran-burning case, but threats to free expression linger in UK,
- Netflix and…chilled? New UK rules target ‘harmful or offensive’ streaming content,
- Australian police raid Canberra bar’s artwork under new counter-extremism legislation,
- German chancellor echoes the frequent — and illiberal — call to end online anonymity,
- Ruling on Palestine Action ban casts even more doubt on UK’s troubling mass arrests of peaceful protesters,
- Spain considers banning teens from social media and holding tech executives criminally responsible for ‘hate speech’,
- Facing mass protests, Iran relies on familiar tools of state violence and internet blackouts ,
- Online speech is powerful. That’s why Iran is silencing it.,
- Repression deepens in Hong Kong with Jimmy Lai’s guilty verdict and censorship over deadly Wang Fuk Court fire,
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