The founders of Germ Network, Tessa Brown and Brett Duboff, talk to guests and community members about the ethics, technologies, and communities that make social media—for better and worse.
On the last episode of GermSyllabus, we take a look into the rapidly approaching technological future. We chat about accelerations in AI, the influence of the Effective Altruism movement and its relationship to FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried, and trends in trust and safety, privacy, and responsible algorithms. Thank you for joining us!
In this episode, Tessa and Brett host Riana Pfefferkorn, encryption policy expert, civil liberties lawyer, Stanford Internet Observatory researcher–and Germ advisor! We discuss Riana’s research into content moderation and reporting in end-to-end encrypted systems, and touch on new updates from Apple that extend end-to-end encryption for their users.
In this episode, we chat with Shankar Ponnekanti, the CTO of Trust Lab, a new startup that makes machine-learning-powered content moderation tools for third parties. (Trust CEO Tom Siegel is also one of Germ’s advisors.) We chat about the kinds of work Trust Lab does, why Shankar’s career at Google led him into Trust and Safety work, and the technical and leadership challenges he confronts as CTO.
7 Feb 2023
Week 7: Affirmative Consent in Platform Design (with guest Jane Im)
This episode features a conversation between Germ and Jane Im, doctoral candidate and first author of “Yes: Affirmative Consent as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Imagining Social Platforms.” Following Jane’s paper, their conversation brings consent into discussions of platform design, UX interactions, business models, and thoughts about Germ’s product plans.
7 Feb 2023
Week 6: Abuse & Supremacism
This episode focuses on the persistence of abuse and supremacism online, and major platforms’ failures to confront or even define abuse successfully. We also think through abuse in DMs and ask what kinds of UX interventions could stem this common, rarely discussed form of interpersonal abuse online.
2 Feb 2023
Week 4-5: Products Reflect Business Models
In Week 5 of Germ Syllabus, Tessa and Brett reflect on how some of our favorite social media and communication products from Facebook to Twitter to Google are shaped by how they do and don’t charge users and their advertiser-supported revenue streams. We notice distortions in user behavior and think out loud about the different choices we are making at Germ.
2 Feb 2023
Week 3: Generation Surveiled
In this episode, Tessa and Brett discuss the troubling rise of surveillance technology in schools and families, and speak to several community members about what privacy means to us. We share experiences with surveillance tech and wonder whether these emerging technologies could be used to support our needs instead of constraining them.
Germ Network is an early stage tech company on a mission to promote healthy communication. We’re building empowering social media, starting with a secure messenger designed especially for Gen Z. We all deserve to feel safe online!
31 Jan 2023
Weeks 1-2: Intro
In this first episode, Tessa and Brett recap what they talked about in two unrecorded Twitter audio rooms. The first conversation was with American University Professor Sherri Williams about #CiteBlackWomen and the #Syllabus. The next was a conversation about "Bias in the Internet’s Foundations,” focusing on scholar Safiya Noble’s work on Google and the movie The Social Network
.Tessa and Brett also preview upcoming episodes, where they talk to other amazing guests as well as really smart technologist members of our community who showed up to chat live!
Germ Network is an early stage tech company on a mission to promote healthy communication. We’re building empowering social media, starting with a secure messenger designed especially for Gen Z. We all deserve to feel safe online!
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