Germ Network

Social media platforms have  created space for marginalized communities’ activism within contexts that are ironically hostile to these same communities. (1) Nationally and globally, platforms like Facebook, Nextdoor, Twitter, and Clubhouse are designed for outrage, managed apathetically, and incentivized to exploit user data and attention. Racism, misogyny, sexism, and misinformation are integral to these platforms’ successes and business models, harming literally millions around the world. (2) Germ Network is a new platform designed for community, privacy, and serendipity, with technological and cultural practices that prioritize safety, made possible by a direct-to-consumer model. Instead of exploiting users to addict them and sell their data to advertisers, Germ sells its software to users directly at a low cost, aligning business with user safety. (3) With an equity-focused matching algorithm, robust moderation practices, and end-to-end encrypted messaging, Germ can create a new online culture that is safer for marginalized people around the world. 

Germ Network is designed to both (1) catalyze civic engagement and (2) actively minimize human and algorithmic biases through novel social media platform design and implementation. Existing platforms have prioritized growth and free expression at all costs, disregarding real harms to users marginalized by race, gender, class, religion, and ability. By refocusing platform design around user safety, Germ Network intervenes in rampant harassment and data exploitation of marginalized users.

Germ Network is a mobile-first social media application that helps users find friends and groups designed with ten years of hindsight on existing platforms’ successes and failures. Robust social and security features help users present themselves and their interests, find friends, build groups, and chat and talk securely. Innovative feature designs prompt users to engage with those they have relationships with, and to participate in a robust moderation culture. A subscription model aligns business with customer needs by allowing the company to never sell user data. 

Women, people of color, and religious and gender minorities are all underserved by major user technology platforms, all run by straight, cisgender white men to functionally privilege those same users. Germ Network’s design prioritizes minorities including women and people of color. Everyone on our founding team is a member of some marginalized identity group and our early user research has explicitly prioritized racial and gender diversity. From our features, to our terms of service, to our governance structure, Germ Network is designed to maximize equity, transparency, and accountability and to minimize harassment, surveillance, and exploitation. Diversity is a key value as we test our prototype and launch our early product. Because algorithmic bias is shaped by input data, recruiting early users from multiple diverse markets will be key to our launch as we intentionally cultivate a diverse user base and moderate to support marginalized users’ safety. Our interviews have shown that, particularly for minoritized users, Big Tech platforms do little to respond to harassment, including penalizing users for reported offline behaviors like stalking and physical violence. Germ is a platform redesigned from the ground up to prioritize user safety as our predominant value. 

Germ Network is designed to both (1) catalyze civic engagement and (2) actively minimize human and algorithmic biases through novel social media platform design and implementation. Existing platforms have prioritized growth and free expression at all costs, disregarding real harms to users marginalized by race, gender, class, religion, and ability. By refocusing platform design around user safety, Germ Network intervenes in rampant harassment and data exploitation of marginalized users.

Our small, remote team has been meeting weekly for 16 months to design and iterate the Germ Network platform. We currently have a completed prototype but no model built. During design we conducted interviews with potential users and will soon begin testing our prototype. The MIT solve grant would allow us to begin development and deploy our MVP to our first users. We are pre-incorporation and are researching equitable governance structures that would put our money where our mouth is, creating shared value for founders, employees, and users.

Germ Network innovates the social media platform space from top to bottom while retaining key features that are familiar and necessary to users. Users will find the familiar features they rely on, but placed in a wider management and design context that responds to longstanding user needs around moderation and data privacy. Our innovation extends beyond the platform design to our terms of service and governance and ownership structures. Hate speech and harassment will be defined using local, contextual, and research-backed practices, and will not be tolerated--repeating offenders will be banned, temporarily and then permanently. Our team is working to design a governance and ownership structure that shares power and profit among employees and users, intervening in and innovating upon the venture-capital business model that has produced enormous profits for social media founders and investors at the expense of their users and the public.

We are in the prototype stage serving 0 users; we hope to develop and onboard our first 1000 users in the next year. I hope we’ll be serving over 10 million users in 5 years. 

Our impact is designed to intersect with the following UN Sustainable Development Goals: Gender Equality; Decent Work and Economic Growth; Reduced Inequalities; Sustainable Cities and Communities;  and Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. For us, key metrics will include our numbers of users and active users; numbers of connections made and groups built; the diversity of our connections and groups, including compared with groups on other platforms; and the diversity of the neighborhoods and neighbor demogrpahics where Germ Network is active.

3 people working part time to bootstrap our platform.

Our founder Tessa Brown, Ph.D. is a lecturer at Stanford University where she teaches and researches social media, antiracist education, youth literacies, and women's and gender studies. Her research into tech platform failures as well as her enthusiasm as a social media super user led her to found Germ Network in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Also on the team is Harika Vajjala, a fintech software program manager with over ten years experience, including as a software engineer, and Brett Duboff, a graphic and UX designer. Together we have consulted with programmers, lawyers, and branding experts as well as conducted user interviews to supplement our experiences. As a founding team, we are from multiple countries, genders, and religions and are all active social media users who have experienced harm and exploitation as well as joy and connection online. Our experiences as scholars, tech workers, citizens, tech users, fans, and community members has shaped our careful and iterative design process.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are central to our work as a team. We are a women-led team who holistically value each other as humans and workers. As a bootstrapped team, our documented processes are limited at this stage. The majority of our user interviews were with minoritized individuals, usually by gender as well as race, and we plan to continue recruiting minoritized folks to test and use our platform, as well as to work on our team. We work every day to practice our values of diversity, safety, and fun, knowing that platform culture begins at the corporate level.

As an academic shifting to entrepreneurship, the MIT Solve community is the ideal community to help me bridge that gap. The community of thinkers, doers, and specialists will support me as my team and I create a solution that we all have been asking for. Germ Network is an early stage project that has everywhere to go in terms of technology, governance structure, scaling our user base, and so on. The more support, connections, and structure we can access, the better.

As described throughout this application, Germ Network is designed to re-orient social media away from white male founders' needs and toward the needs to the minority-majority: minorities of gender, race, ability, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and more. Speaking as an individual founder, however, I (Tessa) am a cisgendered, queer white Jewish woman, and my leadership and design are shaped by my experiences of sexism, misogyny, harassment, and sexual violence on and offline. Social media is not a safe place for women and especially for women of color. Failure to promote women within organizations, including women of color, is directly related to failure to support women and women of color users from harassment, threats, and algorithmic violence online. The Innovation for Women prize would allow Germ Network to build our MVP without taking dilutive, extractive capital that would itself impede our ownership and leadership of our women-led company.