Alex Rochefort is an interdisciplinary internet policy researcher. He holds a PhD in Emerging Media Studies from Boston University. His research interests include internet and media policy, platform governance, and mixed-methods techniques for public policy analysis. He incorporates perspectives from the media and policy studies fields to explain the policymaking processes that shape private and public responses to issues in the digital environment. 

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Entitled Unsafe at Scale: Big Tech, Social Media, and the Challenge of Policy Reform, Alex's dissertation project examines the emergence of social media as a public policy concern in the United States and explains why federal reform has faltered to date. Part I of his dissertation presents a political-economic and sociocultural history of social media technology by tracing the arrival of the computer age in the country, the development of the internet, and the growth of digital platforms between 1950 and 2015. Part 2 describes and analyzes how the “social media policy domain” underwent a dramatic transformation from 2015 to the present day, one marked by a series of controversies, heightened political scrutiny, and fractious policy debates.

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Alex's other research includes a number of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. His 2020 article on the regulation of social media platforms was published in the journal Communication Law & Policy. He has a coauthored book chapter on the history of populism and misinformation in the United States. Most recently, he published a piece in Internet Policy Review on the role of civil society organizations in platform governance.

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Beyond his academic work, Alex has held a number of research positions with civil society organizations focused on internet policy and human rights issues. In 2019, Alex completed a Google Public Policy Fellowship at Freedom House, where he was a member of the Freedom on the Net (FOTN) research team. In 2020 and  2021 , he prepared the United States country analysis for FOTN. From 2021-2022, Alex was a policy fellow with ​​Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) a non-profit research program formerly based at New America where he supported the organization's policy research and advocacy. He also contributed to RDR's annual Corporate Accountability Index. ​In 2024 and 2025, Alex was an independent research consultant with the Center for Democracy & Technology.

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Alex is currently affiliated with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

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Please see Alex's CV for a full list of his academic and civil society work.

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