Hossein Derakhshan is an Iranian-Canadian author, researcher, and public speaker, as well as the pioneer of blogging, podcasts and tech journalism in Iran. He was a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab. He co-authored the report Information Disorder, commissioned by the Council of Europe, on the theory and practice of what is known as ‘fake news’.
Hossein spent six years in prison in Iran from 2008 until 2014. Upon his release, Derakhshan wrote an essay on the demise of blogs titled “The Web We Have to Save” and also one about television in prison titled “Television’s Reinvention and the Era of Post-Enlightenment”.
His current research is focused on the future of journalism (‘Post-news Journalism‘), the politics of the platforms (‘How about a European social platform for news‘), and on ‘fake news’ and information disorder (‘Disinfor wars‘).
His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Wired, Libération, Die Zeit, El Pais, and Corriere Della Sera.
He regularly tweets at 怎样才能浏览国外网址 and publishes on medium.com/@h0d3r.