Germ Syllabus

Week 10: Oh Shit, The Future

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!

Week 9: Encryption & Wellbeing (with guest Riana Pfefferkorn)

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.

Week 8: Content Moderation (with guest Shankar Ponnekanti)

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.

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.

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.