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 is currently completing a PhD at the department of media and communications at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). (View his Google Scholar page.)
Before starting his PhD, he spent 2018 on a research fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and at the MIT Media Lab, where 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’. In 2019, he completed an MSc in Data and Society at the LSE’s media and communications department where his dissertation on ‘Distributed primetime’ received a Distinction.
Hossein spent six years in prison in Iran from 2008 until 2014 over his writings and digital activism. Upon his release, Derakhshan wrote an essay on the demise of blogs titled “The Web We Have to Save”, translated and published into numerous languages, and also one about television in prison titled “Television’s Reinvention and the Era of Post-Enlightenment”.
His current PhD research project is concerned with the socio-spatial consequences of digital platforms, summarised in ‘What My Solitary Confinement in Iran Revealed About the Dangers of Personalized Consumption‘. His other areas of interest include journalism studies (‘Post-news Journalism‘), platforms (‘How about a European social platform for news‘ and ‘Rethinking platform studies‘), information disorder (‘Disinfo wars‘ and ‘The Era of Faked CCTV Has Truly Arrived‘.
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 @h0d3r and publishes on medium.com/@h0d3r.