Nathan Kohlenberg is a research analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, where he tracks authoritarian interference activities in the MENA region and provides research support to fellows on issues including election interference, digital surveillance, and information manipulation on social media, among others. He previously served as a policy associate at the Truman National Security Project, where he remains a fellow. He has written about disinformation and foreign election interference in Defense One, Salon, Just Security, and elsewhere.

Nathan received a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota and an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he conducted research on the South China Sea conflict and contributed a chapter to South China Sea: Maintaining Peace/Preventing War, published by the JHU Press in 2017.

Media Mentions

When tech companies or social media platforms comply with censorship requests from authoritarian or autocratic governments, they risk complicity in those regimes’ repression.
There are a lot of commonalities that you can see between the rise of authoritarianism in both countries [Poland and Turkey].
Autocratic leaders like Erdogan often use ‘maintaining order in the wake of a disaster’ as a pretext to restrict speech, especially speech that may be critical of their handling of said disaster.