Dr. Monica Horten is Policy Manager – Freedom of Expression at the Open Rights Group. She is the policy lead on the UK Online Safety Bill.

She is a published author and independent technology policy analyst. Her published works include “The Closing of the Net” (Polity 2016) and other books on the politics of the Internet. She holds a PhD in communications policy from the University of Westminster, where she investigated legal changes around the enforcement of copyright on the Internet in the EU. She specialises in the field of content online, focussing on human rights issues, including an investigation of Facebook shadow bans, and the UK’s Online Safety Bill. She is a member of EURALO, which represents the voices of European Internet end-users within the ICANN community.

From 2012-2020, she was a Visiting Fellow at LSE. Monica has presented her academic research in the European Parliament and at conferences around Europe. She served as an independent expert on the Council of Europe Committee on Internet Freedoms, where she participated in the drafting of two legal instruments. From 2015-2018, she worked on capacity building programmes in the field of Internet and human rights, funded by the Council of Europe, EU and UNDP, in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

She is a journalist by training, and wrote on telecoms, Internet and computing for many years, with published articles in The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Australian, She has been cited in media ranging from the New York Times, Business Insider, and Deutsche Welle, and has been an invited panelist on Radio 4’s “Thinking Allowed”.