Nicola Lawford is a master’s student in technology and policy and computer science at MIT. She joined the Citizen Lab in 2020 as an Engineers for the World Fellow contributing to research on censorship in Chinese applications. In 2023, she published her undergraduate thesis on the gender dimensions of digital transnational repression experienced by women and LGBTQ+ activists via interviews and platform data collection, with a focus on Twitter as a platform for disinformation and harassment. She co-authored a submission to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders stemming from this work. After her graduation, she continued her work in the lab, focusing on the digital repression of activists. She co-authored a technical brief reporting Pegasus spyware infections in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in collaboration with Access Now.
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Publications
Avoiding the Kitchen Sink
A Guide to Mixed Methods Approaches Within Digital Rights Governance
Citizen Lab’s Gabrielle Lim, Noura Aljizawi, Shaila Baran, and Nicola Lawford recently published an article in Internet Policy Review on the methodology of digital rights governance research. Through a scoping review of 141 articles, the authors assess the relationship between interdisciplinary scholarship and single-, multi-, and mixed methods research. They find that interdisciplinary work is […]
No Escape
The Weaponization of Gender for the Purposes of Digital Transnational Repression
Drawing on the lived experiences of 85 women human rights defenders originating from 24 countries of origin and residing in 23 host countries, we examine how gender and sexuality play a central role in digital transnational repression.
Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict
Pegasus Infections – Technical Brief [1]
We identified widespread Pegasus spyware infections within Armenian civil society. We also identified two suspected Pegasus operators in Azerbaijan, whom we call BOZBASH and YANAR.
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