Ellery Biddle, left, and Aliya Bhatia.
RDR is raising its voice. This month, in keeping with our strategic priority to increase our visibility, we have brought two new team members on board. Ellery Roberts Biddle is our first-ever editorial director, and Aliya Bhatia joined us as our new communications officer.
With this new outreach capacity, we are embarking on a new phase at RDR, where we will not only conduct our annual ranking, but also work throughout the year to put out timely, easy-to-digest social media posts, articles, data visualizations, and other products that can help our partners and stakeholders better understand and take advantage of our research and analyses.
Working with our research, tech, and policy teams, Ellery will lead the development of new media products that will show the connections between our data, the policies that we evaluate, and their practical implications for users’ human rights. Aliya will work to ensure that RDR’s findings, recommendations, and opinions are heard loud and clear, and that our materials reach key stakeholders.
Ellery has been active in the global digital rights community for nearly ten years, primarily at Global Voices, where she worked as a senior editor and advocacy director from 2013 until 2019. She began her work in the field as a policy analyst with the Center for Democracy & Technology, and was also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
At Global Voices, Ellery worked with writers, activists, and technologists from more than 50 countries, telling stories about media freedom in the digital age, and the effects of technology on the lives and human rights of users around the world. She was the editor and lead writer of the Netizen Report, a weekly roundup of global digital rights news originally launched by RDR Founding Director Rebecca MacKinnon. In 2017, she led a team of researchers in a cross-regional field study of Facebook’s Free Basics app, the only one of its kind.
Prior to becoming editorial director, Ellery worked with us on our It’s the Business Model series, as co-author of the first report, “It’s Not Just the Content, It’s the Business Model: Democracy’s Online Speech Challenge,” along with Senior Policy Analyst Nathalie Maréchal.
A graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, Aliya has worked with a range of think tanks and civic tech groups, including The Brookings Institution, Civic Hall, New York Immigration Coalition, and Silicon Harlem. Most recently, she served as a manager of the 2020 Census campaign with the Association for a Better New York, where she coordinated efforts between partners in technology, government, civil society, and media around the Census, developing disinformation, digital security, and media briefing plans.
Together, Aliya and Ellery will be working to build RDR’s public voice and ensure that our research is accessible and usable for all the stakeholders we seek to reach. We’re excited to have them both on board!
Wanna talk to us or one of RDR’s researchers? Get in touch at comms@rankingdigitalrights.org
