The increasing harms caused by hate, harassment, and other forms of abuse online have motivated major platforms to explore hierarchical governance. The idea is to allow communities to have designated members take on moderation and leadership duties; meanwhile, members can still escalate issues to the platform. But these promising approaches have only been explored in plaintext settings where community content is public to the platform. It is unclear how one can realize hierarchical governance in the huge and increasing number of online communities that utilize end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging for privacy.

Ero Balsa is a postdoctoral research fellow at Cornell Tech's Digital Life Initiative. He is interested in how the designs of information systems impact society, mainly in terms of privacy and fairness, and in how to redesign or intervene these systems to address the problems they create. His work examines the design and analysis of privacy enhancing technologies and, in particular, technologies that enable users to contest asymmetries of power and knowledge, such as obfuscation tools and protective optimization technologies (POTs).

Smitha Milli is a Postdoc at Cornell Tech, working with Nikhil Garg and Emma Pierson. Smitha received a BS and PhD in EECS from UC Berkeley where they were advised by Anca Dragan and Moritz Hardt. Their Postdoc is supported by the Open Philanthropy Project.

Sina Fazelpour is an assistant professor of philosophy and computer science, holding joint appointments with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. Fazelpour’s research focuses on issues of justice, diversity, and reliability in data-driven and artificial intelligence technologies. He also works on understanding the concepts and consequences of diversity in social groups and networks. To address these issues, he draws on analytical tools of philosophy, methods of cognitive science, and formal techniques of agent-based simulation and machine learning.