Integrity Institute Receives $1 Million from Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Others

Thanks to generous grants from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Avaaz, and Debra Fine and Martin Schneider, the Integrity Institute has received $1 Million in funding to protect the social internet and enable it to help individuals, societies, and democracies thrive.

New York, NY — The Integrity Institute announces that it has received over $1 million in support since its launch in October 2021, including grants from Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Avaaz, and Debra Fine and Martin Schneider.

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 generous support received to date has helped the Institute develop from an idea into a thriving community of more than 80 integrity professionals with experience on trust & safety, product, integrity, and quality teams across 20+ different platforms – including Facebook, YouTube, Google, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Quora, and Clubhouse.

The funds received to date by the Integrity Institute have had global impact. The Institute’s work has directly impacted the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, the NUDGE Act, the Code of Practice of the Digital Services Act, and the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. The Institute has briefed United States congressional offices, government offices in the UK, the European Commission with EDMO and ERGA, the New Zealand Christchurch Call, nonprofit advocacy organizations, academic groups, and newspapers’ editorial staff. Staff and Fellows of the Institute have publicly testified to the CA Senate and the US Senate Judiciary Committee.

Anamitra Deb, Managing Director, Responsible Technology, Omidyar Network said, “We are proud to support the Integrity Institute’s efforts to shape a better social internet. The organization and its network has already achieved so much in a short period of time, and is key to our collective ability to hold platforms accountable to the public interest.”

Thanks to the support received, the Integrity Institute is continuing its work of building the community of integrity professionals, developing and enriching the knowledge of that community, and sharing the knowledge and expertise of the integrity professional community with policy makers, academics, civic groups, and social media companies.

Sahar Massachi, co-founder of the Integrity Institute, says, “We’re grateful and humbled to have the support of leading organizations in the responsible technology and internet space for our work to protect the social internet.”. 

Integrity Institute Executive Director and co-founder Sahar Massachi worked on Facebook’s civic integrity team, which protected elections and deepened civic engagement worldwide. Chief Research Officer and co-founder Jeff Allen is a former physicist and astronomer who left academia for data science and has worked on multiple sides of the internet information ecosystem: publishers, political organizations and campaigns, and social internet platforms, including Facebook Pages and Instagram integrity.