Mia Speier

Mia Speier is the research coordinator at the Knight First Amendment Institute. She works with the research team to support the Institute’s research and education initiatives, which include scholarship and publications, conferences and symposia and the Visiting Research Scholars program. 

Prior to joining the Institute, Mia studied media freedom, Internet law and digital governance as a Shirley Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her thesis explored Twitter use and press freedom amid the Russia-Ukraine war. During her time in the UK, Mia served as digital director of the Oxford Synthetic Media Forum, the university’s first-ever conference on generative AI, and as an ambassador for Free Press Unlimited, a press freedom advocacy NGO based in the Netherlands. 

She previously interned for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Press Center, Council on Foreign Relations, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, U.S. Agency for Global Media and U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. 

Mia holds a B.A. in International Relations and an M.A. in Public Diplomacy from the University of Southern California, where she earned a 2021 Hearst Journalism Award for her work as a student journalist and was named a 2022 Fulbright Scholar. She also holds an M.Sc. in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford. Mia is interested in platforms, press freedom, digital rights, free expression online and information integrity.