How to get buy-in for T&S (part one)

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

This week's Week in Review (EiM #282) got me thinking about how to get T&S initiatives prioritised when there's not an imminent emergency. So I've got a framework to help you think that through (it's also helpful in other roles too).

The full version is for EiM members (which is worth it for a few bucks/pounds a week, if you ask me) but if you're between work or can't afford it right now, drop an email to ben@everythinginmoderation.co and we'll get it sorted.

Also – I'll be in London next month for the Trust & Safety Summit. I'd love to meet EiM readers there, so send me an email if you want to meet up (and let me know if you need a discount code and I'll hook you up too). Here we go! — Alice

Today’s edition is in partnership with Thorn, working to transform how children are protected in the digital age.

While the benefits of generative AI are being realised more every day; like any powerful tool, the threat of misuse and ability to cause harm is equally high and already being exposed.

Thorn’s latest reference guide looks at the emerging trend of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (AIG-CSAM). This essential guide for trust and safety teams will help you understand the various types of content, key challenges, and key considerations for moderating this content.

What to do when there's a new CEO

Over the years, I’ve worked at companies that have had a lot of change within senior leadership and in the CEO position. That has meant that I’ve had to learn how to get on their radar with the view to getting more resources for my teams.

Sometimes, the CEO naturally cares about Trust & Safety and so it’s easy to get buy-in and investment in safety. Other times, it’s just not top of mind and it takes a bit more scheming to figure it out. 

I’ve not always been successful, but I’ve found that the key is to figure out what the CEO cares about, discover which departments are getting the budget and support, and then find a way to convince those execs that tying in T&S initiatives is to their advantage. This will help the standing of T&S within the new leadership.

A lot of tech CEOs that I've worked with follow this inverted Hierarchy of Growth Business Needs or something similar. As you see below, the focus on is revenue growth, and on brand and strategic differentiation as a way to drive that growth. Compliance and operations — which T&S often get compared to — aren’t top priorities.

The good news is we can map T&S investment to every one of these areas. Here how I would think about proactively making a case for T&S using the framework:

Brand

Why it matters

Branding shapes how users generally feel about the company. This isn’t about being the safest possible option; instead users need to feel as though the brand is safe enough to use, or rather, the brand not being safe shouldn’t be at the top of user’s minds. One difficult thing here: once you draw attention to safety, it’s admitting that it’s a problem. So how can the values of trust and safety be embedded into the brand in a way that feels purely positive? 

Real-life examples

• Uber’s CEO highlighting safety as a core value
• Grindr’s Play Safe campaign (featuring my old team!)
• Match Group’s brand positioning with Tracy Breedon, and then again with Yoel Roth

Note that none of these PR campaigns say the brands are the safest or have safety figured out. Instead, they say that they value safety and are actively working on best practices and/or have a new champion of safety at the company.  

What you can do

• Use T&S systems to promote pro-social interactions, rather than preventing anti-social interactions, focusing on the positive interactions users have with each other. Conveniently, this may only be achieved by investing in detection and enforcement against negative behaviours. 
• Think about tools or features that would help the most marginalised users and also be helpful to everyone else. Some examples might be privacy features or self-care/mental health resources. 
• Pick a value that is important to the brand and champion it: safety, privacy, or self expression.
• Work with Chief Marketing or Brand Officer, plus any departments that talk to customers (customer support, user research, etc), to gain clarity on what core users really care about, and what the general user perception of the brand is. Focus on moving metrics like customer satisfaction and user loyalty. 

Strategic differentiation

Why it matters

Strategic differentiation takes the core brand positioning and then turns it into a unique selling point. This is where the platform wants users to think that the platform prioritises safety in a unique way, or better than their competition. A company using safety as its strategic differentiator is a dream for a T&S team as it means that T&S will have budget and get to innovate. 

Real-life examples

Safety

• Bumble vs other dating apps: “women first”
• Pinterest vs other social media = “A better internet is possible”
• Anthropic vs other AI companies = human values; safety

Privacy

• Mozilla vs other browsers
• Apple vs Android

Expression

• Twitter vs. other social media: “free speech wing of the free speech party”

Note that each one is focused on a core value and a way that the company positions itself with that value against the competition.

What you can do

• Understand what the competition is doing (or lacking) and what users actually care about (user focus groups and advisory groups are great for this). Start with one unique feature and go from there. 
• Be consistent with practical support for users as well as PR releases. This is about more than just branding, there has to be some substance here, and it has to feel sincere to users.
• Find a non-profit organisation with a similar mission and collaborate in an authentic way that feels like a win for both sides. 

Revenue growth

Why it matters

THIS is the thing that most CEOs care about – tech companies must grow exponentially year over year if they want to continue getting funding/ having high stock prices. Revenue growth should be the organic result of branding + differentiation + long-term strategy, but is often primarily tied to specific revenue-generating features (aka enshittification). 

This can be a problem for Trust & Safety teams who are sometimes put in the position of risk management and slowing down potentially dangerous innovation. While calculating ROI and revenue-positive projects is important, I’ve warned against falling into the trap of measuring everything against financials. Sometimes we must do things because they’re just the right thing to do (this is where branding and strategic differentiation can be so helpful). Your allies in this area are product and engineering, finance, user research. 

Real-life example

Twitch’s new policy enforcement rollout is a great example of the latter: by putting an expiration date on enforcements, Twitch users will be banned less, experience less friction on the platform, and presumably be more likely to want to spend money. The key is to make sure that this adjustment doesn’t cause more negative experiences for users as well. 

What you can do

Look at why users are more likely to spend money and see if you can tie a t&S initiative to it somehow:

• Do loyal customers spend more money? 
• Are there features that are good for T&S but that have a component that users would pay extra for? 
• Are there areas where you’re losing money because T&S is clunky? 
• Are you losing money because bad users remain on the platform too long and people leave?
• Are you banning users who might spend money in the future, if only you could rehabilitate them better?  

Operational Efficiency and Regulatory Compliance

Why it matters

Efficiency and compliance can be used as a trojan horse: how can you become more efficient or be compliant AND end up with better results? Don’t fall into the trap of cost-savings or efficiency as the only driver: you may be asked to cut more and more until there’s nothing left. 

Your ally here is finance (which I wrote about here), as well as customer support (with operational efficiency) and privacy (with compliance). Use compliance as an opportunity to do things well that you would never have been able to argue for before. (One example: transparency reports, which I also just wrote about). 

Real-life examples

Honestly, look at any T&S vendor and you’ll see information about efficiency and regulatory compliance. 

What you can do

The key is to find projects that contribute to savings enough that you can save some money and also reinvest a little into a new project that will have other benefits. 

• Tech moves quickly, there may be great new technology out there (especially with AI) that is worth exploring.  Here are some good thoughts on build vs buy.
• Think outside of just operations teams – what other teams are investing in infrastructure that could be shared to increase efficiency? 
• Sometimes doing things in-house is the most efficient, but not always. 
• Can you track the effects of compliance in one geo to make the argument that it should be rolled out globally? 

Putting it all together

A strategic T&S leader will create a roadmap based on what is really important to the C-suite and to users, and will then get buy-in by other department heads to co-pitch the ideas. Getting other leaders really excited about your ideas and initiatives is key: building cool stuff is what product and engineering care about, so if your idea is cool then people will push to work on it.

Honestly, becoming very close with leaders in product, security, and engineering was a big unlock for me. They liked me, wanted to help me, and thought my projects were important and interesting, so they found ways to get my projects on their roadmap. This may be harder at larger companies, but it’s so critical to not work in a silo and then expect to be prioritised. 

A final word of warning: don’t only focus on risk. CEOs are often fine with a certain level of risk and the only way to have zero risk is to have zero users (also not good). Focus on what is helpful, innovative, and aligned with other initiatives at the company. Give back to other departments, help them where you can, and find ways to say “yes” to product ideas (even when there’s risk and you’re low-key freaking out). 

In my experience, other leaders can get really excited about the mission-driven work of Trust & Safety, but they’re tasked with specific goals straight from the top (such as strategic differentiation or revenue generation) they don’t see a way forward that prioritises what they need and can include T&S. Help them connect those dots and you’re much more likely to get the resources you need.

Also worth reading

Content Moderation (Last Week Tonight - YouTube)
Why? I still find it surprising when mainstream outlets talk about content moderation– it's always fascinating to see what they focus on.

Trump's FTC is looking into censorship on tech platforms (TechCrunch)
Why? I encourage American readers to submit a comment! Here's a great one.

From Public Sector to Purpose-Driven Tech: Navigating Your Next Move (All Tech is Human)
Why? A free webinar in March that I feel like readers of this newsletter may appreciate.

How Meta's concessions to the right may have backfired (Platformer)
Why? A new inquiry from the Federal Trade Commission suggests that apologising for "censorship" may have only emboldened the company's conservative critics

Calling all Discord Moderators (Discord)
Why? Discord is doing research into the experiences of their moderator community so they can make improvements. Love to see this!