TRILL PROJECT

YA group of high school girls came together for change and created a mobile app for the LGBT+ community. We’ve asked them some questions about their experience and we’d love for you to see.

Q1: What is The Trill Project?

A:

The Trill Project is a movement, and Trill is our iOS application. Trill is social networking transformed: totally anonymous, private, and supportive, thereby empowering users to fearlessly express themselves. Users are protected by security guaranteed through our use of iCepa’s iOS Tor Framework and anonymity through randomly generated usernames by a color selection. Moderators and proprietary machine learning algorithms prevent cyber bullying. The communities feature on Trill connects users who follow similar tags (not people, since Trill is not a popularity contest for “followers”) in a tight-knit setting for intimate conversations prompted by relevant, computer-generated questions and facilitated by moderators. Trill not only connects users with peers through communities and messaging, but also provides users with professional crisis resources as necessary.

Q2: what was your reason for starting this project?

A:

As teenage girls navigating high school with forces like hyper-partisan politics and even our administrators on dress code, we have been taught to bite our tongues and to swallow our words. Especially now in the 21st century, we are never quite given complete agency over our minds, bodies, and words. We live in a world where the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the disturbing statistics on teen mental health plague the internet. As women in STEM, all too often we have felt marginalized and alone in our male-dominated cis field. Because we ourselves are teenagers with these experiences, our users trust us to build a narrow and deep community to elevate social media as a virtual support group. We want to showcase Trill as a solution, reclaim our voices, and redefine the narrative. We hope to change the way teenagers use social media on a day to day basis.

Q3: Who all runs it, introduce your team and tell us how you all met/came to this conclusion.

A:

Dissatisfied with the status quo, given the challenge to create a business through Girls Who Code, and inspired by face-to-face support groups at our school, the five of us founded Trill as a virtual platform to empower and reform social media as we have always known it. We love to code and have been fascinated with using the dark web to build something positive and meaningful in our daily lives.

Four out of our five of our founders go to the same high school and met through computer science class and/or finance club, and we met our fifth founder at a computer science award ceremony all the way in North Carolina. By chance, she happened to live in Los Angeles as well (which is where we are based!), and team Trill was complete.

We have five founders: Sara, Lexi, Georgia, Ari, and Izzy See our bios below-

Q4: What can we expect to see from The Trill Project in the near future?

A:

We are available for download on the App Store NOW, and we have confirmation from Apple that we will be featured on the App Store in the coming weeks. You can expect that the Trill Project is here and here to stay! We hope to change the way social media functions in our society (once and for all!), and we believe we are building a resource people want and need. We will be rolling out new features (per user requests!) all summer long. In the fall, we plan to host a back to school wellness campaign on high school and college campuses to raise awareness for Trill.

MEET THE TEAM

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