Are we entering T&S’ punk rock phase?

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.

Last week, I gave you my view on what TrustCon's agenda said about the state of the industry (read: back to basics). This week, after three days of panels, meetings and corridor conversations, I'm sharing my updated perspective on where we're at. And it's more upbeat than most might think.

Get in touch if there's anything I can help with, and let me know what you took away from TrustCon. Here we go! — Alice

Today's edition of T&S Insider is in partnership with Checkstep, the AI content moderation solution for Trust & Safety leaders

At TrustCon, our CEO Guillaume had the pleasure of meeting many of you (thank you!) :)

Meeting regulatory requirements was one of the growing concerns he heard the most:

• How to identify the relevant regulations?
• How to translate them into features you can build or buy?
• What vendors can you buy solutions from?

He discussed this during a workshop he held with various legal experts and Trust & Safety leaders.

We've decided to summarise the information shared in a cheat sheet to give you all the relevant information at a glance.

My TrustCon takeaways

When I was a teenager, I was a punk. The thing I loved about the punk community was the strong sense of justice and the “do-it-yourself” spirit. We didn’t sit around waiting for things to happen, we made them happen. When magazines didn’t write about the things we cared about, we self-published our own zines. When music venues wouldn’t book the bands we liked, we’d set up shows ourselves in garages or basements or community halls. When the radio didn’t play the music we liked — and, for me, this era was pre internet music streaming — we’d mail each other mixtapes.

There was an undercurrent of social justice through everything we did, and there was a real sense of community where we knew that we had each other’s back. It was actually because of this community that I got into Trust & Safety at all – my teenage self created an online message board about trading vinyl records (again – if no one else does it, I’ll do it myself!) and that’s where I learned the importance of community guidelines and moderation tools.

I see some of this spirit in the Trust & Safety community today. T&S professionals feel like scrappy underdogs, and yet the mission is important, the work must go on, and so we figure out how to do it ourselves. Last week, I suggested that the theme of TrustCon 2024 was pragmatism and doing more with less, and I wasn’t wrong. However, after attending the event, I was struck by three things: 

Going forward with hope 

Trust & Safety teams have been stuck between a rock and a hard place lately — regulation and high user expectations on one side, and layoffs and budget cuts on the other. I was expecting people to feel pessimistic and under pressure. However, instead of giving in to doom and gloom, the T&S community is becomintg more innovative and collaborative in order to do more with less. Folks are learning from each other, leaning on each other, and figuring out new ways to make the internet safer.

I think this collaboration comes from the fact that our community is more interconnected than ever before, after three years of TrustCon and community groups like the Trust & Safety Professional Association and (despite the rocky last few months) Integrity Institute. Additionally, layoffs have contributed to a lot of T&S professionals switching jobs and bringing their previous knowledge and networks with them. This means that we all know each other better, and silos are being broken down wherever you look.

Collaboration and resources

At TrustCon, the vibe was very much one of collaboration and information sharing, where people were eager to share what they’ve learned and help others where they can. As I’ve written before, there’s a gap when it comes to academic understanding of T&S as a practice. Luckily, we’re seeing more collaboration between industry, academia, and civil society, such as the workshop at TrustCon on Global Majority research, and multi-stakeholder panels on sextortion, election integrity, and terrorism.

We’re also seeing more information sharing and resources available to the T&S community. The Tech Coalition recently announced Pathways, a free set of resources to help tech companies get started with drafting policies for child safety and reporting to NCMEC. Member and community-led projects are happening too, such as the recently released chapter on Safety by Design by TSPA members, and projects such as Focus on Features and Content Policy Best Practices from Integrity Institute members (full disclosure: I worked on the latter resource).

The highlight of TrustCon for me was the workshop that I led with Niantic's Jen Weedon about burnout. We left with half a suitcase full of sticky notes about root causes of burnout, themes, and ways that people and teams need more support. At the same time, it felt both frustrating (that people care so much and aren’t getting what they need to thrive) and affirming (that people want to support each other and we’re all in it together). We’ll be creating a resource kit to share with the wider community based on what came out of that workshop, and I’ll be sure to share it here. 

Innovating through technology

It was impossible to leave TrustCon without thinking that T&S tooling is having a moment. Roblox's Alex Leavitt asked, “Where’s the innovation?” in their panel discussion at TrustCon, and although I do agree with the premise that user-facing safety tools have been relatively static for some time, we are seeing a lot of innovation behind-the-scenes. Smaller tech startups were well represented over the three days, and there was an emerging theme of using new tools such as generative AI for moderation.

One of the areas I’m most excited about is open source Trust & Safety technology. Google, Microsoft, and Meta appeared in a very collaborative panel moderated by the Tech Coalition, talking about what’s new with their open source child safety tools. We also had the Trust & Safety Tooling Consortium, a new initiative that is working on open source tech, explain its vision and seek feedback from the community (full disclosure: the Future of Online Trust Safety (FOTS), which funds the consortium, has provided funding for Ctrl-Alt-Speech). And in the last couple weeks we’ve also seen announcements from Google on open source tech to moderate extremist content, and from Roblox on open source voice moderation tooling.

This is all good news for the T&S community — moderation tooling has been historically built in-house by companies, but is competing for engineering time with shiny new user-facing products. Having more variety available (especially without immediate up-front cost) means that teams can focus on tweaking for specific use cases rather than starting from scratch. I’m excited to see what the tooling landscape looks like in a couple of years.

Also worth reading

Live at TrustCon (Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast)
Why? Only the live audience was able to see me literally bouncing up and down in my chair trying to interrupt Mike Masnick, but hopefully listeners come away with some of the energy in the room as well. (Also featuring Dona Bellow of Reddit and Ben Whitelaw of this very newsletter). 

Could social media support healthy online conversations? New_ Public is working on it (Nieman Lab)
Why? Discussed in the Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode, but worth reading regardless, this article talks about New_Public’s focus on local newsgroups and the need for small, independent online communities. 

Understanding the evolution of AI Systems (Rumman Chowdhury)
Why? Unfortunately, Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s flight was canceled and she wasn’t able to give her keynote speech in person at TrustCon, but the silver lining is that everyone can see it now. A great talk on the intersection of AI safety work and Trust & Safety work.

The Surge of Gendered and Racial Attacks on Kamala Harris was Predictable. Social Media Platforms Still Aren’t Prepared (Tech Policy Press)
Why? A look at how women of color are systematically attacked online, and some practical recommendations for how platforms can address the issue.

New decision addresses Meta’s rules on non-consensual deepfake intimate images (Oversight Board)
Why? The Board looked at two cases – one involving a public figure in India, and one of a public figure in the US – and makes recommendations for clarifying policies and improving reporting processes.