Integrity Institute Receives $520 Thousand from Knight Foundation for Elections Integrity Program

Thanks to a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Integrity Institute will be running a program supporting the integrity of elections on social media platforms through 2024.

New York, NY – The Integrity Institute is launching their Elections Integrity Program to support elections in online spaces, thanks to a three year, $520,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This grant will enable us to support our community of integrity professionals as they work to protect elections online, through a suite of projects.

Social media platforms continue to play an increasingly important role in democratic elections. For the 2022 US Midterms, the Integrity Institute will be

• Running a series of elections events to support integrity professionals who are currently protecting elections online or have in the past

• Analyzing the policies and actions that social media companies are taking in advance of the elections, including

  • A database of platform announcements regarding elections, in partnership with the Bipartisan Policy Center, with a historical analysis

  • An analysis of platform actions in advance of the 2022 US Midterms

• Conducting original research on how platforms are currently performing and producing datasets useful for elections integrity, including

  • A dashboard tracking the extent to which misinformation is amplified on the platforms with an analysis of implications on platform design

  • A dataset of PageRank scores for domains and social media accounts

• Reports on good practices and effective tactics to protect elections in online spaces

You can track all our work for the program on our Elections Integrity Program Hub.

The multiyear support provided by the Knight Foundation will enable the Integrity Institute to play a long term role. The next three years are pivotal to protecting democracy and the integrity of elections around the world - especially in the online space. In 2024 alone not only will there be a U.S. Presidential election but elections in India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the European Union. This work needs to start now - not just a few weeks before voting starts.

The Knight Foundation grant will allow the Integrity Institute to implement a long term strategy to protect elections in online spaces. It begins by starting now in helping small companies plan their integrity strategies, holding big companies accountable to continue and build upon and improve their election integrity work, and giving the public, policymakers and NGOs new tools to understand how to navigate new networked propaganda and inauthentic behavior.

Katie Harbath, the Elections Program Lead for the Integrity Institute, said, “The challenges of protecting the integrity of elections online continue to get harder and more complicated. As platforms big and small are thinking through their strategies we want to help support integrity workers on this work as well as help the public understand the threats. We’re so grateful to the Knight Foundation for supporting this work.”

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.

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 worked on integrity teams at Facebook and Instagram which protected users from inauthentic and exploitative actors on the platforms. Elections Program Lead Katie Harbath worked as a director of public policy at Facebook, where she built and led global teams that managed elections and helped government and political figures use the social network to connect with their constituents.