Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa learned how to stand up to a dictator when she was targeted by gendered disinformation linked to former president Rodrigo Duterte. The BBC’s Marianna Spring ha...
Rana Ayyub
Rana Ayyub is an Indian investigative journalist and a global opinions writer at the Washington Post. She has worked as a reporter, editor, and columnist with some of the leading publications in India and internationally. Her pieces appear in the Time, New York Times, Guardian, Atlantic, and Foreign Policy and she has been profiled for the cover of the New Yorker. Rana has reported extensively on majoritarian politics and violence, extrajudicial killings by the state, Islamophobia, communalism and authored an international bestseller entitled Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up.
Rana’s work is focused on the marginalized and the oppressed. She advocates and reports about the fight against misinformation and the protection of democratic ideas. It is for this work that she has faced extreme forms of persecution by the Indian government which includes multiple cases for which she is facing trial in India.
In a career spanning fifteen years, Rana has been awarded the Sanskriti award for integrity and excellence in journalism by the former President of India. She was the recipient of the Global Shining Light award for Investigative journalism in 2017 and the Most Resilient Global Journalist of 2018 at the Peace Palace in Hague. In 2019, she was named among ten global journalists who faced maximum threats to their lives across the world. In 2018, the United Nations allotted six special rapporteurs to the Indian government to protect her safety, a first for an individual case in India.
In 2020, she was announced as the recipient of the McMgill medal for journalistic courage. In 2021, she was given the award for Excellence in Journalism and International Human Rights by Texas Tech University.
In 2022, she was awarded the Overseas Press Club Award for her incisive commentary on India and the same year she was awarded the John Aubuchon press freedom honor, the highest journalism award by the Press Club in the United States. Rana has been named among the ten journalists in the world who face maximum threats to their lives. She lives in Mumbai with her family.
Towards an early warning system for online violence: how to monitor digital attacks on women journalists and prevent escalation
The Chilling, a major global study produced by UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), found a clear link between online violence and offline harm. 20% of survey respondents and do...
Online violence against women journalists: a global scourge that demands urgent action
Women journalists are increasingly the targets of online violence connected to orchestrated disinformation campaigns waged by states, political actors, conspiracy networks and misogynists. They have b...
When the State attacks: journalism under fire in the world's biggest democracy
#ijf22talk by Rana Ayyub. Moderated by Julie Posetti. According to Reporters Without Borders, India is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. Four Indian journalists wer...
Why does a 26-year-old journalist decide to go undercover with six cameras on her body, living an isolated life as a Hindu nationalist, undertaking one of the riskiest undercover operations? What happ...
Prime targets of a weaponised internet: online violence against female journalists
Women are increasingly the targets of online violence connected to orchestrated disinformation campaigns waged by states and political actors. They have become targets of online communities weaponised...
Starting on 05 August 2019, Indian authorities imposed an Internet and social-media blackout in Kashmir for more than five months; although some restrictions were lifted in mid-January, many remain in...
The #metoo movement in India was set off by Priya Ramani’s 12 October 2017 article in Vogue India entitled To the Harvey Weinsteins of the world in which she accused a former editor of hers – wi...
Freedom after expression: censorship of the press and violence against journalists in India and Pakistan
Growing levels of scrutiny, pressure, and intimidation tactics on the press in both India and Pakistan have introduced a disturbing era of undeclared censorship from state and non-state actors in both...
When a state trolls: strategies for responding to online harassment against journalists
In the Philippines, a coordinated campaign of “paid trolls, fallacious reasoning, leaps in logic, poisoning the well” were among “the propaganda techniques that helped shift public opinion on ke...
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