Applied Social Media Lab
The Applied Social Media Lab (ASML) is an applied engineering lab that brings together a team of technologists and practitioners to reboot, rebuild, and reimagine the social internet to serve the public good. Launched in June 2024 at the nexus of engineering, movement building, and governance, ASML enables industry-trained technologists to build social media solutions that center people and their wellbeing, free from commercial incentives.
ASML is currently working on new and unique technology solutions focused on the key areas of Transparency and User Control, Discourse, Interoperability, and Safety. ASML operates through cross-functional pods led by Harvard faculty principal investigators, anchored by product managers, and staffed with skilled technologists, engineers, designers, and researchers. ASML’s unique model draws from academic, product development, and journalistic best practices to support fast-paced, research-based software development to solve real-world problems.
Working closely with BKC’s interdisciplinary community, ASML develops software solutions that make online spaces more secure, private, safe, healthy, and constructive (not polarizing). ASML collaborates to move promising projects from experimental prototypes toward practical, user-friendly tools and platforms accessible to all. Each project follows a time-bound roadmap in which teams develop an idea, validate it, distill key insights, and translate those findings into a scoped prototype. They test the prototype, refine it, and ultimately release the work to the public.
All projects will be open-sourced to contribute to an online experience that aspires to create the original promise at the heart of social media: creating genuine and meaningful human connection.
The Applied Social Media Lab and its programs are supported by generous contributions from Frank McCourt and the 501(c)(3) non-profit Project Liberty.
