Nahiba Syed

Nabiha Syed is the CEO of The Markup, a media nonprofit that challenges technology to serve the public good. Forbes has called Nabiha “one of the best emerging free speech lawyers” and in 2023, she was honored by theNAACP with their Digital Civil Rights award.

Under her leadership, The Markup’s pioneering data-driven journalism was named by FastCompany as a WorldChanging Idea and a Most Innovative Company. Previously, Nabiha served as Vice President and AssociateGeneral Counsel at BuzzFeed, as the company’s first newsroom lawyer navigating high-stakes litigation, and as the First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times.

She has worked on legal access issues at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, represented asylum-seekers in south Texas,counseled on whether to publish leaked and hacked materials, co-founded the nation’s first media law clinic, and spoken widely about misinformation and propaganda, including to two sitting presidents. For her work, Nabiha has been named as a “Rising Star” by the New York Law Journal and received an inaugural Reporter’s Committee for the Freedom of the Press Award.

She holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins, a J.D. from Yale Law School and another law degree from Balliol College,Oxford, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar.