Mona Elswah
Project Fellow, Content Moderation for Languages in the Global South
Mona Elswah is a Project Fellow at CDT, where she examines content moderation policies and measures in non-English languages, focusing on countries in the Global South. Mona is a research contractor with CDT and is also a Research Associate at Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute (OII). Before joining CDT, Mona was a Fellow in Technology and Human Rights at Harvard University’s Carr Center, where she examined the algorithmic repression employed by tech companies against Arab users.
In 2023, She earned her PhD from the OII at the University of Oxford. In her thesis, she examined the impact of digital repression on social movements’ online tactics, focusing on Syria and Tunisia as case studies. At the OII, she was a core member of the Democracy and Technology program (formerly known as the Computational Propaganda Project), where she examined junk news, information operations, and platform governance in non-Western contexts.
Her work has been featured in several international media outlets, and she has presented her work at different conferences and events. In addition to her Ph.D., Mona holds a master’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication and a Post-graduate Diploma in Public Policy from the American University in Cairo.