Announcing Integrity Institute's 2023 Visiting Fellows
The Integrity Institute is thrilled to announce its inaugural cohort of Visiting Fellows. Starting in July 2023 for a period of six months, 16 Institute members with extensive on-platform integrity experience will join as Visiting Fellows on a voluntary basis to lead projects that support the Institute’s research, policy, and community anchors. The Visiting Fellows program is part of the Institute’s growing portfolio of structured programs that support and elevate integrity, trust & safety expertise among the Institute’s membership.
The inaugural cohort of Visiting Fellows will lead projects along two separate tracks: the Community track and the Research & Policy track. In the Community track, Bri Riggio, Grady Ward, Morgan Boeger, Nichole Sessego, Rebecca Thein, Sarah Amos, and a team comprising Alice Goguen Hunsberger and Talha Baig will lead projects ranging from creating leadership resources for integrity, trust & safety professionals to expanding capacity for the Institute’s member-led Trust in Tech podcast. In the Research & Policy track, Antonia Woodford, Glenn Ellingson, Matt Motyl, Sam Toizer, Sasha Mathew, and a team comprising Arushi Saxena, David Evan Harris, and Theodora Skeadas will create and expand the Institute’s integrity best practices guides across multiple themes, as well as engage with policymakers and external organizations. For detailed information about the Visiting Fellows and their projects, please see below or here.
Top row L-R: Alice Goguen Hunsberger, Antonia Woodford, Arushi Saxena, Nichole Sessego; second row L-R: Grady Ward, David Evan Harris, Sasha Mathew, Bri Riggio; third row L-R: Rebecca Thein, Matt Motyl, Sam Toizer, Morgan Boeger; bottom row L-R: Theodora Skeadas, Sarah Amos, Talha Baig, Glenn Ellingson
“This is a fantastic cohort of Institute members with which to kick off our Visiting Fellowship program,” said Sahar Massachi, executive director of the Integrity Institute. “These Visiting Fellows take their integrity hippocratic oath seriously, and I’m flattered that they chose to pursue projects that help protect people, societies, and democracies through us. As a cherry on top, this inaugural cohort showcases both the diversity of roles and the breadth of platform experience in our membership. Take a close look at the bios of these Visiting Fellows and the projects they are taking on – you’d be excited too.”
The Integrity Institute is a think tank powered by a community of integrity professionals: tech workers with experience in integrity roles — roles dedicated to fixing harms to people and society within social internet platforms. The Institute cultivates a thriving community of 210+ integrity professionals with experience on trust and safety, product, integrity, and quality teams across 40+ different platforms – including Facebook, YouTube, Google, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Quora, and Clubhouse. Institute members have observed, and often helped build, the architecture of the social internet, and they are committed to sharing their expertise so that the social internet can help individuals, societies, and democracies thrive.
Community track
-
Bri Riggio currently leads Discord's Platform Policy Team and was the company's first Counter Extremism Team Lead. Before joining Discord, Bri worked at several higher education institutions and nonprofits, operating at the intersection of education and international relations. She has used her experience interacting with academics, activists, and government entities to inform her work in the tech industry.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Bri will crowdsource, document, and compile leadership best practices and resources for new and emerging leaders in the integrity field.
-
Grady Ward is an engineer based in Boulder, Colorado, and currently one half of Silicon Ally, a two-person 501(c)(3) focused on helping nonprofits scale their impact. Prior to Silicon Ally, Grady was at Google and worked on a broad range of issues that surround the responsible custodianship of data, including counter-abuse, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Grady will work with the integrity community to develop a feature taxonomy of integrity praxis that connects unfavorable online outcomes to design and business choices, so that product managers could recognize these choices and prevent potential harm caused by products.
-
Morgan Boeger is a safety strategist with six years of experience in gaming and social media, and currently a trust & safety team member at Medal.tv. Morgan first entered the integrity field to fight abuse from bad actors targeting the platform where she first found community and an outlet to express herself online, and her work since then is centered around community and continuous improvement in how platforms identify and act against hate and threats to child safety.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Morgan will interview integrity professionals to profile who they are, how and why they came to this work, and their individual approaches in order to amplify voices and foster connection and community among the practitioners in the field.
-
Nichole Sessego is an integrity professional who has launched election and misinformation products and policies at some of the largest social media platforms with a focus on operations, as well as an Integrity Institute Founding Fellow. In 2019, Nichole was the Elections lead for CrowdTangle, a Meta-owned social listening tool, before joining Meta’s Misinformation Operations team. In 2021, she joined Twitter’s Launch team to focus on civic and misinformation products and policies.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Nichole will produce a content series featuring Institute members illuminating key trust and safety concepts through discussion of platform user questions you didn't even realize were about trust and safety.
-
Rebecca Thein is an experienced product, program and people manager at the intersection of society, responsible product development and accessible design. Rebecca was most recently a Senior Technical Program Manager at Twitter, where she oversaw the globalization efforts of civic and crisis response work, including the Brazil & US midterm elections, Covid misinformation and the conflict in Ukraine.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Rebecca will lend her expertise to the Institute’s external relations work and collaborate with staff on cultivating development and public presence opportunities for the Institute and its members.
-
Sarah Amos is a former journalist turned product manager with nearly a decade of experience at the intersection of tech and media. Most recently she worked in Twitter’s Trust & Safety Team as a product manager for civic Integrity, building features to mitigate the harms of platform manipulation, misinformation and abuse during global election cycles. Before that Sarah founded and led the R&D department at the AI platform Dataminr.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Sarah will develop public programming that deepens the Institute’s external engagement and—through community–explores, debates, and educates the public about protecting the social internet.
-
Alice Goguen Hunsberger specializes in human-centered user experiences for a diverse and global user-base. Over the last 13 years, she's led Trust & Safety, Policy, and Customer Experience Operations at two of the world's largest dating apps: OkCupid and Grindr.
Talha Baig is co-founder of a YC backed stealth startup that empowers integrity teams to have more impact. Before that Talha spent three years at Meta as a Machine Learning Engineer working to reduce human, drugs, and weapon trafficking.
As 2023 Visiting Fellows, Alice and Talha will continue producing the Trust in Tech podcast, which explores the world of the people who keep the internet safe and healthy: professionals in integrity, trust and safety and other adjacent fields.
Research & Policy track
-
Antonia Woodford is a product manager building new consumer experiences while safeguarding against technology’s abuse. At Meta, Antonia led the product team that fought misinformation across Facebook and Instagram, with a focus on global elections and critical events. At startups, she has worked to develop virtual hangout spaces for friends, broaden internet access in emerging markets, and grow a B2B e-commerce marketplace.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Antonia will lead the Institute’s working group on integrity best practices for early-stage companies, producing resources that startup founders and employees can use when first tackling trust and safety issues.
-
Glenn Ellingson is a technologist specializing in the safety of online platforms. After leading various initiatives at Oracle, PayPal/eBay, and a number of smaller start-ups, Glenn supported civic integrity engineering teams at Facebook through the 2020 US election and other elections around the world, as well as Instagram’s Accurate Information team through the covid pandemic.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Glenn will continue leading the Institute’s elections integrity best practices working group (a component of the Institute’s Elections Integrity Program) to publish a set of guides for protecting elections across diverse internet platforms.
-
Matt Motyl is an award-winning behavioral scientist who has spent the past 17 years studying cognitive biases, misinformation, and threats to democracies around the world. He led initiatives to improve recommendation algorithms to promote higher quality civic, health, and news content on social media. Matt is now a Senior Adviser at the Psychology of Technology Institute and University of Southern California Marshall School of Business’ Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Matt will partner with the Neely Center in building a social media index using nationally representative survey data to identify what types of positive and negative experiences users have on the most popular social media apps.
-
Sam Toizer is a product leader deeply passionate about the intersection of online communication, civics, and democracy, with a proven track record of using product solutions to create safe and productive online spaces. Currently, Sam leads the moderation experiences team at Nextdoor. Prior to this, he spent eight years at Twitter, where he was the global product lead for election integrity and misinformation.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Sam will lead the efforts to create “Integrity 101” — a set of educational materials to empower product managers, engineers, and others to make their products safer.
-
Sasha Mathew is a lawyer with training in public administration. She was a product policy lead at Twitter and previously worked on electoral integrity at Whatsapp. She currently leads Policy & Compliance at Concentrix, a global content moderation services company. She has also worked with election and cybersecurity regulators in India and the US, and was a spring fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
As a 2023 Visiting Fellow, Sasha will explore the concept of systemic risk in online platforms by charting a taxonomy of systemic risk, as well as providing guidance on how to track and mitigate such risk.
-
Arushi Saxena serves as the Head of GTM and Policy at DynamoFL, a seed-stage Y Combinator (W22) privacy & Generative AI startup. Previously, she led Product Marketing & GTM for Twitter's Trust & Safety team, with a specific focus on Information Integrity and Elections-related features. Prior to Twitter, Arushi was an Assembly Research Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a Privacy Product Management Consultant for Consumer Reports Innovation Lab.
David Evan Harris is Chancellor’s Public Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and Continuing Lecturer at the Haas School of Business. From 2018 to 2023, he worked at Facebook and then Meta on teams confronting some of the most challenging issues facing the company—civic integrity, misinformation and responsible AI.
Theodora Skeadas recently left Twitter, where she managed the Trust and Safety Council, managed a research hub within the Public Policy team, supported the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium, and managed a trusted partners program. Theodora is currently consulting with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the National Democratic Institute, and the Committee to Protect Journalists on a journalist safety tool, while also working part-time as the Executive Director of Cambridge Local First.
As 2023 Visiting Fellows, Arushi, David, and Theodora will work with the community to develop legislative priorities and educate relevant stakeholders on these issues, including civil society and potentially policymakers.