On October 18, 2023 the Applied Social Media Lab hosted the Future of the Internet Summit. We brought together leading academics and cutting-edge technologists for a frank conversation about how social media, generative AI, and other disruptive technologies both erode and support healthy democratic societies. The Summit also examined how tech companies (and individual tech professionals) can best contribute to building technology that serves the public good.
Harvard Law, Computer Science, and Public Policy Professor and Berkman Klein Center Faculty Director Jonathan Zittrain hosted a conversation with technologists who were at the center of the turmoil and have since directed their new career paths to serving the public good. From tech platforms grappling with rampant misinformation, to the massive shifts in the social media landscape and the meteoric rise of generative AI, these industry veterans gave their firsthand account of the current state of affairs:
- Yoel Roth: UPenn Knight Visiting Scholar; Former Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter; former Berkman Klein Center Dangerous Speech Project Researcher.
- Tracy Chou: CEO of Block Party, a startup focused on digital anti-abuse and anti-harassment tools; former Pinterest and Quora engineer; former technical consultant in the United States Digital Service in the Obama Administration.
- Kasia Chmielinski: Berkman Klein Center Assembly Program alum and co-founder of the Data Nutrition Project, Practitioner Fellow at Stanford; formerly of Google, Zest AI, McKinsey, Mozilla; former member of the United States Digital Service in the Trump Administration.
- Jason Goldman: Senior technology advisor to Barack Obama. In 2007, he helped start Twitter where he was Head of Product and served on the board of directors until 2010. In April 2015, he became the first Chief Digital Officer of the White House.
DJ Patil (General Partner at GreatPoint Ventures and former White House Chief Data Scientist) led a discussion with the lab’s faculty leadership about the lab’s inaugural projects, exploring the technical details of those projects and the interplay with regulatory, economic, and social factors. Participants included:
- James Mickens: Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulsen School of Engineering and Applied Science
- Latanya Sweeney: Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director and Founder of the Public Interest Tech Lab
- Lawrence Lessig: Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School