Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC. She founded the School’s Center for Media and Social Impact, where she continues as Senior Research Fellow. Her books include Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, 2d. ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2018), with Peter Jaszi; Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She has been a Fulbright Research Fellow twice: in Brazil (1994–1995) and Australia (2017). She has also been a John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival among others. Aufderheide has received numerous journalism and scholarly awards.

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He has been a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on the networked economy and society since the 1990s, with a particular focus on political economy, commons, cooperation, and decentralization. His books include Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006). His work can be freely accessed at benkler.org.

W. Lance Bennett is Professor of Political Science and Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, where he directs the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement (www.engagedcitizen.org). The focus of his work is on how communication processes affect citizen engagement with politics. His publications include The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013), with Alexandra Segerberg. He has held visiting professorships at Harvard University, Uppsala and Stockholm in Sweden, and Free University Berlin, and has an honorary doctorate from Uppsala. He has received career achievement awards from the American Political Science Association, the International Communication Association, and the US National Communication Association. He has also received a Humboldt Research Award. His current interests focus on how to better align thinking about the economy, democracy, and the environment in order to build more equitable and sustainable human systems.

Erik M. Conway is a historian of science and technology living in Altadena, California. He completed a PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1998, with a dissertation on the development of aircraft landing aids. He is currently the historian of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (www.jpl.nasa.gov), a unit of Caltech. Conway’s most recent book is Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars, published in 2015 (John Hopkins University Press). He shared a Guggenheim Fellowship with Naomi Oreskes in 2018, and received a 2019–2020 Huntington Fellowship. He has two books in progress, a history of Near-Earth Objects research and policy development, and, with Oreskes, a history of market fundamentalism. Prior to graduate school, Conway served as an officer in the US Navy for four years, serving as a damage control assistant and acting chief engineer, and then as an operations officer for COMPHIBRON ONE in San Diego, CA.

Ben Epstein is Associate Professor in Political Science at DePaul University. His research focuses on political communication, American political culture, and American political development, with particular emphasis on the intersection of the Internet and politics. His first book, The Only Constant Is Change: Technology, Political Communication, and Innovation Over Time, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. This book explores how major changes in political communication occur over time. It identifies and tests the political communication cycle, a recurring pattern which incorporates the technological, behavioral, and political factors involved in political communication innovations.

Dave Karpf is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He teaches and conducts research on strategic political communication in the digital age, with a particular focus on the use of technology within political organizations. He is the award-winning author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2016). His work has been published in a wide range of academic journals, and has also appeared in The Nation, Nonprofit Quarterly, the American Prospect, Esquire, and WIRED.

Steven Livingston is Professor of Media and Public Affairs and International Affairs and the Founding Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics (IDDP) at the George Washington University. Between 2016 and 2019 he was a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. Livingston has held a number of other visiting appointments at the Brookings Institution, St Gallen University in Switzerland, the Free University in Berlin, and Cambridge University in the UK. He studies the role of technology in politics and policy processes, including human rights monitoring, disinformation campaigns, governance, and the provisioning of public goods. Among other publications, Livingston has written When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (University of Chicago Press, 2007), with W. Lance Bennett and Regina Lawrence; Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood (Oxford University Press, 2014), with Gregor Walter-Drop.

Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and the award-winning author of several books, including Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford University Press, 1994); Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Harvard University Press, 2006); The American Women’s Movement, 1945–2000: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St Martin’s, 2009); and Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), with Donald Critchlow. She also served as coeditor (with Edward H. Peeples) of Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism. Her most recent book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs, the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award, and the Lillian Smith Book Award. The Nation named it the “Most Valuable Book” of the year.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world-renowned geologist, historian of science and public speaker, she is a leading public intellectual on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and anti-scientific disinformation campaigns. Her books include Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010); The Collapse of Western Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2014); Discerning Experts (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Why Trust Science? (Princeton University Press, 2019); and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). Her opinion pieces have been published in newspapers across the globe, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Times, Le Monde, and Frankfurter Allgemeine. In 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow for a new book project with Erik Conway, “The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea.”

Victor Pickard is Professor of Media Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication where he codirects the Media, Inequality and Change (MIC) Center. His research focuses on the history and political economy of media institutions, media activism, and the politics and normative foundations of media policy. He has published dozens of scholarly articles, book chapters, and policy reports, as well as essays for The Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and The Atlantic. He has authored or edited six books, including America’s Battle for Media Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights (The New Press, 2011), with Robert W. McChesney; After Net Neutrality (Yale University Press, 2019), with David Elliot Berman; and Democracy without Journalism? (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Paul Starr is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. He is also cofounder and founding coeditor of the American Prospect magazine. Among his books are The Social Transformation of American Medicine (Basic Books, second edition 2017), which received both the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American History; The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (Basic Books, 2004), which received the Goldsmith Prize; Freedom’s Power: The History and Promise of Liberalism (Basic Books, 2008); and most recently, Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies (Yale University Press, 2019). A regular columnist for the American Prospect, he also writes for the New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and other publications.

Heidi Tworek is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. She is a nonresident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Tworek’s latest book is News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2019). She has coedited two volumes: Exorbitant Expectations: International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Routledge, 2018); and The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business (Routledge, 2019). She has published or has forthcoming around thirty chapters and articles in periodicals including American Historical Review, Journal of Policy History, Business History Review, and German History. She is coeditor of Journal of Global History and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She writes regularly in outlets including the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, WIRED, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, ZEIT, and Internationale Politik.

Charlie Tyson is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University. His academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture, the George Eliot Review, the British Journal for the History of Science, and Poetics Today. His public writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Hedgehog Review, The Point, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Inside Higher Ed, and The Nation. He holds a master’s degree in history of science from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar.