A note from our Founders:

Despite everything, we still believe in the internet. 

Our names are Jeff Allen and Sahar Massachi. We both worked on integrity teams at a big social platform. We saw, firsthand, the terrible things that people do to each other online, and the ways that social platforms, as currently constituted, amplify and create all kinds of problems. We’ve seen mass online propaganda disguised as “just normal <citizens of country X>”. We’ve seen poisonous information ecosystems. We’ve seen some of the worst hate speech, bullying, hoaxes, and bad faith you can imagine. And yet still, we believe. 

It is possible for the social internet to help us thrive: as individuals, as societies, and as democracies. It’s possible, but it’s not happening right now. 

There is a path forward. We’ve been part of, and borne witness to, an incredible flowering of a specific kind of expertise across our industry. There are people who know, in detail, the harmful dynamics of the online information ecosystems that we live in. There are people who know, in detail, how to build social platforms that mitigate or avoid those problems. Those people do tremendous work, on tight constraints, trying to fix flawed platform design. They are called integrity professionals.

Integrity workers hold the public trust and moral obligation to do the right thing. If social media companies are the new cities, we are the new city planners. We build the speed bumps, plan the sewage systems, and even design the physics of the city, so that everyone stays safe and the platforms don't just rely on manual intervention as the main line of defense. It’s important work that has implications for not just individuals, but also societies and democracies. So, like doctors, lawyers, or public servants, we have a duty to more than just our immediate clients. We have to hold ourselves to a values based oath. 

Over the last ten months, we’ve gathered up some of the best in the industry. We’ve had conversations, meetups, and arguments, all in the service of moving from “a group of people with a bunch of opinions born by experience” to something more like a science. Today, we are making our knowledge available to the world as an open-source integrity team. We call it the Integrity Institute.

We believe that the world deserves to hear independent, honest explanations of the emerging fields of integrity, like how to research information ecosystems, best practices in platform design, and the mechanics of modeling and mitigating propaganda attacks online. We believe that this can happen while still holding true to our commitments to our employers, without breaking NDAs, and through doing what we do best: technical work, collaboratively, at a high level of skill. And we believe that the best way to do it is a think tank truly powered by a cohesive integrity community, one that we’re committed to nurturing.

We, the dozens of members of the institute, come from many different backgrounds: different platforms, different roles, different preferred solutions or ideologies, as well as traditional axes of diversity including nationality, gender, religion, race, and ethnicity. We disagree on many things — and we look forward to showcasing those disagreements publicly and respectfully — but we all believe that this can work. 

Ours, of course, isn’t the only perspective that matters. As more integrity workers (like you?) join our community, we look forward to having a richer view of the landscape. Beyond that, we know that integrity isn’t the only value to aim for. Privacy, content moderator working conditions, the perspective of specific impacted identities, market power, balancing all that with growth — all those things are important too. We look forward to collaborating with a wide variety of organizations representing these priorities. We will serve as infrastructure, ready to be used by an ecosystem of different stakeholders. 

If this sounds exciting to you, that’s great news. Let’s talk! We’ve been member-powered from the beginning: this will only work if integrity workers join together and devote time to our shared goals. We’ve also been self-funded since the beginning, but that can’t last forever. If you have the ability to give or connect us to funding, we’d appreciate that too. 

The dream of the good internet feels far off today. But it’s possible! We know how to fix many of the problems, and can figure out the rest. Let’s make it happen, together.