Philippa Smith is an independent researcher with a PhD in Language and Communication, grounded in a previous career as a journalist in New Zealand. Her work explores the intersection of language, media, and digital communication, with publications on news discourse, counterspeech, reality television, and the visual framing of political crises. A former Associate Professor lecturing in critical media studies at Auckland University of Technology, she has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is deputy director of the Toroa Centre, an honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland, and contributes to research on online harm and digital safety.