Ben Reininga is the former head of editorial at Snapchat, where he established partnerships with major news organizations, built protocols to fight misinformation, and worked to create a more engaging and diverse content experience. He led moderation efforts on Snap’s content surface, Discover. Prior to that he spent more than a decade in editing, video production and newsroom management. He is currently a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, where he will focus on the rise of creator journalists on social platforms, identifying responsible ways to harness growing audience interest while maintaining credibility.
Jesselyn Cook is an award-winning investigative reporter and nonfiction author who has written extensively about online conspiracy theories and their offline harms. Her new book for Penguin Random House, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family, won a Lukas Prize. Prior to covering the tech beat at NBC News, she was a senior reporter on HuffPost’s national enterprise desk. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and international relations from New York University and is a 2025 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
Jonathan Bellack is Senior Director of the Applied Social Media Lab within the Berkman Klein Center. He is a veteran Internet technology product manager. His 30 years of experience started with dot-com era startups in New York City, Silicon Valley, and the UK. In 2004 he joined the digital advertising technology firm DoubleClick, where he helped lead a turnaround culminating in their $3.1 billion acquisition by Google in 2008. He spent another decade leading product management for technology platforms that helped millions of small and large media companies worldwide build and grow their digital advertising business.
At the end of 2018, Jonathan changed his focus to making people safer online. He was the first-ever product management director at Jigsaw, a Google unit building experimental technology to combat digital harms including organized harassment, repressive censorship, and state-sponsored disinformation. He then served as senior director of product management for Counter-Abuse Technology and Identity, where he built a 50-person team that helped protect Google and YouTube users from malicious actors, untrustworthy content, and compromised accounts.
Jonathan is a husband and father to two sons, with a boundless enthusiasm for grilling and cooking, his new labradoodle, and all flavors of nerdery from comics to video games to Dungeons & Dragons and beyond. He serves on the boards of Montclair Local Nonprofit News and New Jersey 11th for Change. Jonathan received a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from the NYU Stern School of Business.
Johan Farkas is an Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research explores the intersection of digital media, journalism, disinformation, and democracy. He is the co-author of Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood
Bill Adair is an award-winning journalist and educator. He is the creator of PolitiFact and cofounder of the International Fact-Checking Network. In 2013, he became the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting (with the PolitiFact staff), the Manship Prize for New Media in Democratic Discourse, and the Everett Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress.
Mary Anne Franks is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology. She is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at George Washington University School of Law and the President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. Her other areas of expertise include Second Amendment law, criminal law and procedure, and family law.
Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) and founder of the Center for Digital Dignity. She has published widely on online extreme speech, disinformation, AI and content moderation, decoloniality, digital cultures, and platform governance. During her fellowship, she will explore the growing role of small social media platforms in shaping contentious speech, launching a new cross-national study, and will advance comparative research on encrypted messaging and extreme speech.
Sasha Issenbergis a journalist and the author of four previous books, including The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, and, most recently, The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage. He is a correspondent for Monocle, and has written for New York, the New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Politico Magazine. He teaches in the UCLA Department of Political Science.
Miranda Wei is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington in the Security and Privacy Research Lab and member of the Tech Policy Lab. Her work investigates the security, privacy, and digital safety of everyday people through contemporary sociocultural lenses (e.g., gender, interpersonal relationships), especially on social media. Her work has been published in security and HCI venues including USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, ACM CHI, SOUPS, ACM CCS, and ACM IMC.
Kendra Albert is a technology lawyer and a scholar of technology, gender, and power. They are a clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, where they teach students to practice technology law. Kendra also teaches on technology and transgender rights in the Program on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Their scholarship has been published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, ACM FAccT, Cell Patterns, Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, and in volumes such as Feminist Cyberlaw and the Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence.
Kendra holds a JD cum laude from Harvard Law School and a BHA from Carnegie Mellon University. They serve as the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Tor Project, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Massachusetts.