New Mozilla director Nabiha Syed wants to bring ‘joy and creativity’ back to the internet (exclusive)

Nabiha Syed, who was previously CEO of investigative tech news nonprofit The Markup, is joining the Mozilla Foundation as executive director, she tells Fast Company in an exclusive interview. 

Syed will be stepping into an organization that looks to bring its open source, pro-user freedom approach to the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence. The Mozilla Foundation—the nonprofit parent organization of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, best known for producing Firefox—generally works to promote open technologies and user control of personal data and devices.  Last year, it announced a $30 million investment in Mozilla.ai—a new lab focused on building trustworthy, open source AI tools—and acquired Fakespot, which builds AI tools to help shoppers spot fake product reviews and understand real ones, as part of an overall push to shape AI to benefit the public good.

For Syed, it’s the natural next step in a career built in promoting human agency and the public good online—even as, lately, the internet can feel dominated by a few big, for-profit companies. 

“Mozilla is one of those brands that I think I knew about it from my early internet consciousness,” Syed says. “And it is one of those brands that has this history of putting people before profit and creativity before control.”

Prior to joining The Markup in 2019, Syed worked as a media and First Amendment lawyer, serving as associate general counsel at BuzzFeed at a time when the site’s news division was regularly publishing prize-winning investigations and commentary.

“The BuzzFeed newsroom was fundamentally about joy, creativity, and then listening to what people were putting out into the world,” she says. “I think those three principles of just joy, creativity, and listening are ones that are really important anchors for the [Mozilla] Foundation’s work.”

At 38, Syed came of age in the freewheeling early days of the web. In her case, that meant using a home desktop machine to build Geocities pages, write X-Files fan fiction, and connect with friends and relatives on AIM. It’s the kind of experience she’d like to see future generations have, even if the exact tools and technologies they use will look different from the era where Mozilla first entered the public consciousness providing an alternative to Microsoft’s browser monopoly. 

“People’s digital lives should be marked by joy and creativity,” she says. Syed already worked with Mozilla during her time at The Markup, when the two organizations enlisted users to track what sort of online data was being swept up by Meta’s tracking tech. (The Markup was recently acquired by California nonprofit news outlet CalMatters). The research spotted Meta’s Pixel code monitoring user behavior on sensitive sites like medical patient portals and the Department of Education’s financial aid application form. Other privacy tracking software developed at The Markup helped researchers spot the Meta Pixel in other places many people wouldn’t want to be tracked, like websites of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. 

“That is the type of tool that I would love to keep working, investing, [and] building,” Syed says.

Mozilla, Syed points out, has done some of its own work promoting an understanding of the software and hardware people use online, like creating a hub of privacy info around popular software and gadgets and building a browser extension to let users log unpleasant YouTube recommendations. The foundation also gives grants promoting “a more open, inclusive internet” and offers fellowships funding researchers and activists working in that arena. The organization’s dual ability to both fund innovative work and build technology in house is rare and valuable, says Syed.

“Having both of those muscles in one place is extraordinary,” she says. “I actually just don’t know of that many places that can do it.”

As she prepares to shepherd Mozilla’s work through the AI era, Syed says her experience in both law and journalism has taught her to think of problems like the shape of the tech world in terms of “systems and structures”—and what it takes to shift them.

“This is not etched into a marble tablet for us,” she says. “We can build something better.”

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