The trust & safety space is a strange one in that I think it’s one of the least understood but most important industries that impacts tools most people use every day. So many people misunderstand the role of trust & safety professionals often (falsely) thinking that they are censors (they are not) or that they have some magical ability to stop bad things on the internet (they do not).
As Alex Feerst wrote for us a few years ago, trust and safety is largely made up of caring people who really, really are trying to make the internet a better place, figuring out the best way to create rules for specific platforms that encourage good/helpful/useful behavior and minimize bad/dangerous/risky behavior. Every platform has different rules and incentive structures, but every platform that hosts third party speech needs to have some sort of rules, with some sort of enforcement mechanisms.
- Date Published:7.31.2025
- Original Publication: Techdirt