Meet the Applied Social Media Lab's Principal Engineers

Berkman Klein Center's Applied Social Media Lab recently welcomed three Principal Engineers to design the technology behind their mission to reimagine, rebuild, and reboot social media to serve the public good.

Meet Chelsea, Brendan, and Zoe!

Chelsea Johnson

Before joining ASML, Chelsea was the Director of Technology for Tiny News Collective, where she built technology solutions for small local newsrooms serving diverse communities across the U.S.

What first made the internet special to you?
As someone who has used the internet most of her life, I took it for granted for longer than I’d like to admit. Then in 2020, my local community faced the first lab-confirmed Covid case in the country and physical gatherings quickly vanished. It was then that I truly appreciated the internet as a crucial tool for maintaining a sense of connection and community.    

What topics are you most excited to address at BKC?
I look forward to exploring how social media, and technology in general, can shift from being a barrier to being a catalyst for social change. More specifically, how would social media look like if communities historically excluded from its sociotechnical architecture were now leading its redesign? I’m curious whether that might add to our current understanding of online connection, mental health equity, and civic engagement.    

Connect with me for:
Connect with me for a cafecito to discuss musings or creative brainstorming around digital equity, mental health equity, and tech-assisted connection building. Excited to apply my 10+ years of tech-building experience to these spaces!

Currently reading:
I'm fascinated by this recent piece in Big Data & Society by Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin: "Repairing the harm: Toward an algorithmic reparations approach to hate speech content moderation." I appreciate how this article adds an additional layer to how reparations can happen within the social media context, and specifically what can be done by tech builders to participate in the process.

Brendan Miller

Brendan's most recent focus before joining BKC was assembling a library of Decentralized, Open-Source Social Networking and Collaboration Applications and Platforms, which you can view on Github.

What first made the internet special to you?
From my early days getting online via bulletin board systems (BBS), I was awestruck by the potential for the internet to connect diverse people around the world. I retain a hope and vision for an internet that brings the people of the world closer together in enriching ways, connecting us more deeply to our shared humanity and creative potential.

What topics are you most excited to address at BKC?
I hope that my efforts can contribute to digital democracy, an expansion of civil rights online, and a healthier social media experience for all. In particular, I am interested in tools for democratic self-organization and advancing the adoption of open approaches, protocols and standards that are human-centric rather than platform-centric.

Connect with me for:
Connect with me if you have an interest in solutions that do not require a central authority but are instead inherently decentralized and democratic. I'd love to hear from you.

Currently reading:
This article in Nature, "Can Digital Tools Foster Ethical Collaboration" interests me because I am a big believer that we can reinvigorate our democracy with deliberation online.

Zoe Robert

Zoe formerly worked at Facebook and comes to BKC from Column, a public benefit startup that facilitates the public notice processees in local newspapers across the US.

What first made the internet special to you?
Growing up, I never met my dad’s side of the family. While studying abroad in Madrid in college, I used Facebook to find my international relatives and organize a family reunion in the South of Spain. Thanks to social media, I was able to visit my father’s childhood home and see photo albums going back generations. While the global nature of a platform like Facebook is full with problems, that experience made me believe in the magic of global connectivity.

What topics are you most excited to address at BKC?
There are so many! Preserving news media, facilitating platform transparency, regulating data brokers, the future of education as it relates to AI, and privacy-forward social media to name a few.

Connect with me for:
Lately, I have been particularly interested in how the collection, movement, and regulation of data impacts our digital rights. If that or any of the above topics interest you, I would love to chat!

Currently reading:
I have been obsessed with Eaten By the Internet (link to free PDF), a collection of essays about internet infrastructure edited by Corinne Cath and featuring thinkers like Meredith Whitaker and Joan Donovan.