Alumni Feature | Sakshi Mehra, Master’s in Public Policy ‘17

After studying Business Administration at the undergraduate level, Sakshi had the opportunity to work with Google India for two years. She was a forerunner of abuse and content enforcement, and helped the core policy team with insights to launch user safety guidelines. She says, “A newbie entering a leading Silicon Valley technology company, I was completely mesmerised. The experience left me intrigued about the simultaneity of the life-transforming power of the internet on one hand, and its increasing safety concerns on the other. As someone who believes the internet to be an inherently good place- one where livelihoods are built, massive knowledge exchanges occur and communities flourish, I wanted to work towards mitigating the risks by developing an ecosystem of policies, tools, talent, and processes of strategic importance. I was determined to influence this colossal landscape and upskill in every possible way to be able to do so. This is when I decided to pursue the Public Policy course at National Law School of India University, Bangalore; one that turned out to be a fundamentally transformative experience. The course exposed me to policy drafting rationales from a global perspective, broadened my worldview and helped me appreciate community perspective, a critical component of any policy design.” After a short consulting stint with Deloitte India’s Public Sector practice, she made her way back to the industry that holds her heart – technology.

In 2018, she joined the Trust and Safety team at LinkedIn that works towards mitigating all forms of abuse on the platform. As a Trust and Safety Quality lead, she works closely with multiple stakeholders to drive clarity and consistency on policy application, enforcing several critical violations like hate speech, cyber-bullying and misinformation. The public policy course at NLSIU empowered her to take on what she had determined to do at the start of her career- build policies and processes to make the Internet a safer place. The scope of research and community interaction that the course offers was an avenue she thoroughly enjoyed, be it a field study of the farming community in the villages of Karnataka to identify policies to promote organic farming or the exchange program at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (HiOA) to understand the revered Scandinavian welfare model. Her dissertation was focused on human rights and responsible business practices, and she believes she has drawn on this rigorous training experience to contribute to the discourse of corporate accountability. She feels passionately about digital safety and user experience, and hopes to influence behaviour online towards open-mindedness and empathy.