Sahar Massachi was born in Israel to two refugees from Iran, and grew up in Rochester, New York. During a four year stint at Facebook, he worked on the civic integrity team, which protected elections and deepened civic engagement worldwide. Before that, he ran the data for fundraising at Wikipedia, founded two prosocial startups, and served as the founding data scientist at Grovo Learning. Since then, Sahar became a fellow (now affiliate) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He’s a member of the advisory committee of the Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice, a StartingBloc fellow, and a Roddenberry Fellow. Sahar is the co-founder and executive director of the Integrity Institute. He lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with his beloved.
Twitter: @sayhar
Assembly Fellowship Project:
If we’re going to reboot social media, Sahar Massachi believes we’ll need access to a critical resource: integrity expertise. Integrity professionals are tech workers with experience addressing and mitigating harms to people and societies within social Internet platforms. The Integrity Institute, co-founded by Sahar in 2021, brings these individuals together as part of an organization that aims to create a social internet where people, societies, and democracies thrive. As both a think-and-do tank and a community of practice, the Institute Integrity advises policymakers, companies, and academics, while developing best practices for the profession at large. Sahar’s time as an RSM Assembly Fellow was spent building out the Integrity Institute’s operations and expanding its community during a key period for the trust and safety space.
