Adam Taylor: Creator of Black, A Newsfeed Made For Us

Q: Who is Adam Taylor, and what does your company do?

Adam: I’m the founder of Langston. We’re an artificial intelligence (AI) and software company that’s purely dedicated to the Black experience. We’ve created an app called Black in the App Store, and it’s the world’s first news aggregator that’s focused specifically on Black culture and mental health. We use a data mining system that crawls the web for any content related to the Black experience, whether directly from a Black publisher or a publisher that doesn’t specialize in Black culture. We can mine the content and then analyse each article for its emotional weight of the articles. We’ll give this information to our users so they can follow any publisher they want and filter their feeds based on the emotional weight of the articles. This will allow folks to take a break from any negativity they may have from a media consumption standpoint and give them more control over what they see in their feeds. This feature is something that we’re so excited to release, and we believe this is going to be out in the next two months.

Q: Tell us step-by-step how Black works from a user’s perspective.

Adam: When you’re in the App Store, you download the app, and the first thing it does is introduce you to the brand with a page that says “Welcome to Black.” From there, you’re brought to your feed, and the first thing you’ll see is the featured article and a feed generated for you on the fly by our AI engine. This gives you [the user] an overall view of what’s going on in the community. As you click articles, read, engage, and learn more about your personal preferences, the content shown is specifically tailored to your interests. You can also directly follow publishers as well. You can browse news by entertainment, culture, news, and politics. You can save an article and share it on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook with your friends, family, and people you know.

Q: How can we access Black?

Adam: Right now, the app is available on iOS only.

Q: In what ways do you think mainstream technology may exclude Black people or people of colour (not designed with Black people in mind), and how can we fill this gap?

Adam: I think it’s really about having more people that look like us behind the scenes working to build these platforms. It’s about finding a way to bring other Black engineers, designers, and writers together to work on a common forum. That’s one of my goals in building this company. I aim to have us write that love letter to ourselves and have us make the platform. Ultimately, you’re going to build your creation in your image. Also, when thinking about how I go about building this platform, it takes a lot of empathy. It takes a lot of care, love, and sacrifice. I’m always thinking, “How is it going to impact someone that looks like me? How is this going to impact the culture? How is this going to impact my mom?” So when you’re thinking about how we can be more inclusive, how we can build platforms that not only entertain us but benefit us – it’s about companies having us behind the scenes and working together dreaming up ideas and creating.

Q: Was there a specific experience that gave you inspiration for Langston and Black?

Adam: It started in 2016, post-election day. It was a lot to have to go to work the next day. I was working as I still do today at MIT. I remember this distinctly – that train ride into the office. The train is always packed. I’d be the only person of color on the train. It was heavy to go to work the next day to experience that. To go into predominantly white meetings and think, “well, which one of y’all voted for this person [Donald Trump]?” Sometimes you don’t know who’s smiling in your face, but deep down, harbours those same kinds of viewpoints that conflict with fundamental human rights. I found that I needed an outlet to vent my frustrations, and that’s how Black came about. That’s how I got started on this whole path of entrepreneurship—finding a way to alleviate my stress and worries about the world and create something that could benefit people who go through the same things I do. As I said, this is my love letter to Black folks.

Q: What do you see for AI technology’s future, and how can it benefit our lives?

Adam: I think the future is about finding ways to help move us forward, but and give us more control over what we consume. When you think about other platforms and the feeds shown, they’re all based on technology that doesn’t give you a choice. I think the future of AI is really about giving us control over what we see. That’s what I want to do with Black and Langston, allow folks to control what they see. We shouldn’t forget that behind these AI platforms are teams of people. We lose sight of the fact that they were all initially designed by humans. That’s why we’re working on taking mental health so seriously. In the future release of Black, folks will be able to control the feeds and dictate how positive or negative those feeds are.

Q: What advice do you have for young Black inventors or entrepreneurs that are trying to spread awareness about their vision or just in general?

Adam: To push yourself beyond your limits. I think many folks don’t realize how much growth they can produce in themselves by just having a learning mindset. For me, I didn’t start out building iOS apps. I wasn’t formally educated on building AI architecture. I found that the knowledge I needed was just a search query away. My advice is really to focus on learning and always to take that extra step to solve a problem that you’re having.