Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman is a media scholar and internet researcher who left the University of Massachusetts Amherst to join McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy in Montreal, Canada, as the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair in the Digital Public Sphere, beginning in June 2027. He is one of six scholars joining McGill and part of the Government of Canada's first cohort of 64 researchers recruited to 21 Canadian universities, backed by roughly $1.7 billion (US$1.2 billion) in funding that supports each recruited team for 8 to 12 years.

Zuckerman earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Williams College in 1993 and, as a Fulbright scholar, studied musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Ghana at Legon. He spent eight years as a researcher and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, where he co-founded the citizen media platform Global Voices in 2005, before joining MIT in 2011 to direct the Center for Civic Media at the Media Lab. He joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2020 as associate professor of public policy, communication, and information, where he founded the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure to research and build alternatives to the commercial internet and served as research director for the university's Public Interest Technology program.

He is the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection and Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them, with a third book due from MIT Press in late 2026. Research tools built under his direction, including the Media Cloud platform developed with Harvard's Yochai Benkler and Hal Roberts, have been used to study how ideas and disinformation spread across media ecosystems.

At McGill, Zuckerman's lab will study platform power at major technology companies, advancing what he calls "unpermissioned research" — using scraping, sampling, and data donation to examine how platforms host and moderate content — in close collaboration with the Media Ecosystem Observatory led by Taylor Owen and Aengus Bridgman. He has attributed the move partly to federal cuts to NSF and NIH funding, tightening visa conditions for international students, and political attacks on researchers who study misinformation and content moderation, alongside Canada's offer of long-horizon research funding at a scale he described as unprecedented in his career.