Suggestions
Tessa Brown
Lecturer, Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University
Tessa Brown is a writer, academic, and entrepreneur with a diverse background in education and digital media. She was a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University from 2017 to 2022.12 During her time at Stanford, she taught popular writing courses such as "Hashtag Activism" and "Hiphop, Orality, and Language Diversity".1
Brown holds a Ph.D. in Writing Studies and Women's and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, an MFA in Creative Writing – Fiction from the University of Michigan, and a Bachelor's in Religion and Creative Writing from Princeton University.13 Her research focuses on rhetorical history, antiracist struggle, and digital media, with publications in academic journals and popular media outlets.1
Currently, Tessa Brown is the CEO and Co-Founder of Germ Network, a social media platform built for digital trust.12 She is also a community organizer based in San Francisco.14 Brown's approach to business is grounded in anti-racist and feminist education and research practices.1
Highlights
Hot take on the social media Senate Hearings: recommendation algorithms are designed to show people exactly what they want to see, addictively, forever. If a grown man wants to see 7 year old girls, that is what Instagram will show him--with a button to contact each of them. Same goes for fascism-curious teen boys, anorexia-curious teen girls, conspiracy-theory-curious suburbanites. Insta, Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Tiktok, Youtube--are all built on the logic and the business of the recommendation engine.
Then, each of these companies have a Trust and Safety team whose job it is to work against the incentives of their own products. Zuck likes to say they have the biggest T&S operation in the world. Well, Meta also files the majority of child exploitation reports in the world--abuse their platforms didn't magically just discover, but algorithmically, by design, facilitated. Fac-i-li-tated!
If we want to have different results--if we want to live in a different world--our social software needs to be built around different incentives. New technology, new business models, new forms of connection.
I'll be over here, watering the germ of something new.
#recommendations #trustandsafety #senatejudiciary #socialmedia #meta #tiktok #snap ... #germ
