About UpTrust
We design digital spaces where credibility and care reconnect communities.
UpTrust started when a group of technologists, community organizers, and trust researchers asked a simple question: what if social media rewarded the people who help us think better together?
After years of watching public discourse fracture, we committed to building a platform where healthy dialogue comes first—not as something we tack on later, but as the foundation everything else is built on.
Today we prototype alongside civic networks, researchers, and partners who steward complex conversations. Their lived experience shapes our product roadmap, governance experiments, and long-term stewardship model.
UpTrust's goal is better civilization, through better internet—through better dialogue—through better algorithms—through prioritizing quality of content, synthesis, trustability and interdependence rather than individualism and shock value that create filter bubbles.
While acknowledging that "better civilization" is subjective, we exist to facilitate a world where:
- Truth matters more: where humans can honor relativity while admitting that there's always a relative better and worse, that we can't necessarily know what it is, but we can still move toward more truthful. Disagreements come into contact to generate creativity and development, rather than echo chambers and polarization. Some differences are polarities that never resolve, and can instead be appreciated for what they are.
- Love matters more: where dialogue is nourishing—meaningful, compassionate and ethical, rather than bullying, victimizing, and tribalistic. It liberates, connects, and grows us.
- More collective awareness: We have a better sense of ourselves as collectives—more awareness of the whole, of the parts, of common knowledge and egregores, etc.
- More Alignment: both in the AI sense, and when transcending our humanity is fulfilling it.
We pursue this in a way that enhances individual liberty and opt-in collective actions to making better futures.
Legacy platforms tune their systems for attention capture. Outrage, novelty, and speed become the default metrics of success, even when they erode the social fabric we rely on to solve real problems together.
UpTrust takes a systems-first approach. We build trust graphs that account for context, expertise, and community-defined legitimacy so every person's feed reflects the people and sources they rely on.
Our Values
The principles that guide how we design, iterate, and steward UpTrust
Purposeful Systems
Purpose guides all our decisions. We align incentives around long-term collective wellbeing and civilizational improvement—not short-term metrics or profit alone.
Evidence Before Amplification
We prioritize context, provenance, and nuance. Truth is perspectival and dynamic—what's credible depends on who you trust and why, not just consensus.
Co-Creation
Everyone builds the culture and has responsibility for the organization. We use self-management and the advice process to design alongside the people most impacted.
Stewardship Over Scale
We grow intentionally and stay relatively small with autonomous teams. Success is measured by the health of dialogue and communities we serve, not growth metrics.