Karen Kornbluh

Distinguished Fellow for Technology and Competitiveness
Washington, DC Office
GMF Tech
Staff,
GMF Expert
My Areas of Expertise:
Disinformation Foreign Policy Technology and Democracy

Ambassador Karen Kornbluh has helped shape policy as a public servant and diplomat since the early days of the commercial internet. The New York Times called her a “passionate and effective advocate for economic equality”, and she was named one of Washingtonian magazine’s top influencers. She leads GMF Digital (formerly Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative) which works to ensure that technology supports democracies worldwide.

Kornbluh was confirmed unanimously by the US Senate to serve, during the Obama administration, as ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). While there, she spearheaded the first global internet policymaking principles, led the effort to provide open access to OECD data, and launched the OECD Gender Initiative.

She served in the Clinton administration as deputy chief of staff at the Treasury Department and director of the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs at the Federal Communications Commission, where she negotiated early internet policies. She was policy director for Senator Barack Obama and the author of his 2008 platform.

Kornbluh began her career as an economic forecaster at Townsend-Greenspan and worked in the private sector at various times in her career, including as executive vice president at Nielsen, the global data firm, where she launched the Nielsen Foundation.

Kornbluh chairs the boards of Radio Free Europe and the Open Technology Fund. She has had numerous fellowships, including at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mozilla, the Center for American Progress, and New America. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Media Mentions

by
Karen Kornbluh
“ The U.S. should pursue a new digital foreign policy focused on a 'digital policy lab' to foster domestic policymaking, a 'technology task force' to promote international cooperation, and promotion of the White House-led Declaration for the Future of the Internet. ”
Translated from English
Politico
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ Joe Biden’s continued leadership is essential if the U.S. is to build on the new industrial policy to replace laissez-faire globalization with a new agenda that produces widespread prosperity and addresses the daunting challenges of the 21st century, from climate to the global debt crisis to the rise of authoritarianism. ”
The New Republic
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ Today's step is too late and too little. Platforms must address the algorithms and other design loopholes that allow their sites to be weaponized in the first place. ”
CNN
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ It even leaves up RFK Jr’s public Facebook page. In addition, both RFK Jr and CHD remain active on Twitter, showing how inadequate the Whac-A-Mole approach is to conspiracy campaigns. Instead platforms must address the algorithms and other design loopholes that allow their sites to be weaponized in the first place. ”
The Guardian
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ Too many groups like Children’s Health Defense have been allowed to flourish on social media for too long. The group remains on Twitter. Today’s step is too late and too little. Tech companies must address the reasons misinformation spreads so readily on social media. ”
AP News
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ The Senate's passage of the CHIPS+ bill is welcome bipartisan progress on one of the most critical technology issues the US faces. This kind of government investment... can help check the rising tide of economic pessimism that feeds nativism and polarization. Big bets like this bill are exactly what's needed to jumpstart the optimism that motivated previous generations to invest in the future and each other. ”
Fierce Electronics
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ [The EU is] trying to learn the lessons from GDPR, but that being said, it’s complicated to move from a national-level regulatory system to a commission-level regulatory system and to coordinate all that. ”
Washington Post
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ Bennett could set the standard for all who follow. Her leadership is essential at a time of resurgent authoritarianism around the world — to ensure that people living under repressive regimes not only have access to accurate information but also can see models of excellent journalism in practice. ”
VOA News
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ The mechanics of the platform are not neutral. The “manipulation machine” can be exploited by domestic extremists as well as foreign state actors and scammers, sometimes perpetuating anti-Semitic and white supremacist content ”
The Cornell Daily Sun
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ There's a real danger that if Twitter changes its policy to only remove content that violates the law, we will see even more extremism at home and censorship abroad. ”
Axios
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ In order to protect human rights online, especially freedom of expression, it’s now necessary to invest in broadband connections and digital skills, while also protecting against surveillance, online violence and discrimination, and cyber-attacks. ”
Axios
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ The declaration updates the internet freedom doctrine so that in addition to a right to connect and not be censored, the signatories also recognize a right not to be surveilled or attacked by propaganda, harassment or cyber attacks. ”
Politico
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ The general public doesn't want to see more conspiracy theories and more harassment and more hate speech. There's this [disconnect] between what he's saying he wants to do [to loosen content restrictions], which sounds like a culture war initiative, versus saying that he wants to increase their profits. It doesn't seem to add up. ”
CNN
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ Such offers lead many to wonder whether this is all a joke to Musk – or if it is strategic. He has this huge platform and he maintains it by doing unexpected and crazy-seeming things, often he seems to benefit from the chaos. ... Superficially he seems to argue everyone should be able to say what they want on Twitter, which is an attractive argument to some. But this is a special case – it’s about following SEC regulations, not free speech. ”
The Guardian
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ At least in the EU, you're going to have to put in place systems that control the amplification of illegal speech, and then you're going to have independent audits and the regulators are going to be watching. ... His comments are a little bit naïve of the changing regulatory system. ”
NBC News
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ [Twitter] is a moneymaking platform where your ideas are amplified if they're going to help the company make money. When you poll people, people say they want moderation, that they don't want conspiracy theories floating freely on their platforms, that they don't want harassment. So I think it's a misunderstanding of what people want. ”
NPR
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ Social media platforms are caught in the middle of an information war. While they’re taking steps to avoid profiting from providing information, and against state media, they’re not acting as aggressively to take down content — in part because they see value in providing access to information. ”
Washington Post
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ It's a tough balancing act for platforms. They do not want to call the shots in foreign policy disputes. ”
CNN
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ They want the ability to move to not one big global network but different networks where you can surveil your citizens more easily. In the longer term, Russia wants to be able to cut off access to Signal. ”
NBC News
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ There is a growing sense they have a moral obligation to ensure their sites are not exploited at a time of crisis. The Russian playbook is clear — and the companies are under pressure not to wait to act against fake accounts or malign influence activity until after they are used to interfere with humanitarian assistance or inflame the conflict. ”
AlterNet
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ There is a growing sense they have a moral obligation to ensure their sites are not exploited at a time of crisis. The Russian playbook is clear — and the companies are under pressure not to wait to act against fake accounts or malign influence activity until after they are used to interfere with humanitarian assistance or inflame the conflict. ”
Washington Post
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ You can never be cyber-secure, it's always evolving and attackers always have the edge. The question is, as we get tested more and more, are we continuing to evolve? ”
Axios
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ There's a financial incentive, and there's a political incentive. And some of the actors that we see are in it for one reason or another and some are in it for both. ”
NPR
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ The tech sector is so innovative and creative and allows people to do so many things we never could have imagined before. We can't lose our sense of wonder about it all, and because there are these new opportunities, I do think the industry is going to try to put a lot of these problems behind it before we move into this new era. ”
ABC News
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ I'm trying desperately to be optimistic. This has been a learning year. We didn't need another learning year – but I do think a lot of people learned a lot about how this all works and how entrenched it is and how dangerous it is. ”
ABC News
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ The Facebook Papers showed that the platform can function almost like a turn-key system for extremist recruiters and the metaverse would make it even easier to perpetrate that violence. ”
Bloomberg
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ Facebook [should] adopt a kind of “circuit breaker,” where the share button is automatically but temporarily removed on content that starts getting deep reshares very quickly, until the content can be evaluated. Something like this, could have stopped the disinformation video “Plandemic” from getting millions of views before it was ultimately removed from the site. ”
FiveThirtyEight
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ This is a national security vulnerability. Social media goes well beyond providing users tools to connect organically with others. It pulls users into rabbit holes and empowers small numbers of extremist recruiters to engineer algorithmic radicalization. ”
Roll Call
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ The [Against Malicious Algorithms Act] could incentivize larger platforms to try to avoid amplification that causes harm. ”
Axios
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ This week the dam seemed to break. The scrutiny on Facebook has made more lawmakers realize that researchers should have access to company data, to be able to assess how the services are working. ”
New York Times
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ There are clearly still tensions — the leaders need to reconcile this new vision [for more coordination on tech and trade] with their domestic industries’ interests, which is why there’s less progress on semiconductors and platforms at this point than might have been expected. ”
Politico
by
Karen Kornbluh
“ Wednesday’s developments are a win-win for both the Biden administration’s foreign-policy agenda and Ursula von der Leyen’s digital Europe. There’s a seismic shift in the global economic ground rules happening in Pittsburgh. ”
Bloomberg

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