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
- Are AI companies doing authoritarians’ dirty work?,
- The crusade to ban teens from social media is advancing across Europe,
- German bill would criminalize denying Israel’s right to exist,
- Canada is considering action against ‘false and misleading information.’ But exactly what action is a mystery.,
- Will Germany amend one of its most censorial laws?,
- In defense of anonymity, the guard dog of free expression,
- The ‘papers, please’ era of the internet will decimate your privacy,
- UK teen social media ban is anonymity-killer for adults,
- You don’t need to live in China to experience China’s censorship,
- French bill would criminalize ‘from the river to the sea’,
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