Surya Mattu is a Brooklyn based investigative data journalist, engineer and artist who builds tools to investigate algorithmic systems and the societal harms they can cause. He leads the Digital Witness Lab at Princeton University.
At The Markup he created Blacklight, a real-time website privacy inspector, and led Citizen Browser, a first of its kind independent audit of Facebook’s recommendation algorithms. His work at The Markup has received public recognition including two Edward Murrow awards and an NABJ award. He was also a 2021 Knight Wallace fellow.
Previously, he was a contributing researcher at ProPublica, where he worked on Machine Bias, a series that aims to highlight how algorithmic systems can be biased and discriminate against people. Machine Bias was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Journalism. His work has been exhibited at Somerset House, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt , The Whitney Museum, V&A Museum and Bitforms Gallery.