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https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/22/important-and-needed-new-report-scaling-trust-on-the-web/>
"We talk a lot about the concept of “trust & safety” at internet companies, but
the entire concept is relatively new, and still very confusing to many,
including some who work in the field!
Over the last few years we’ve seen a growing movement to organize and somewhat
“professionalize” the space, with very important and useful new organizations
like the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA) and the Digital Trust &
Safety Partnership, both of which are filling in important gaps and helping to
make “trust & safety” a much clearer concept and profession.
But, still, there is plenty of confusion, especially for those with no
experience at all, who (extremely incorrectly) think “trust & safety” is a
euphemism for “censors” or something similar. In fact, the trust & safety role
springs naturally from people trying to do exactly what the name says: make
sure a web service is trustworthy and safe for users. Usually, this starts with
dealing with spam, but quickly picks up on other areas of problematic content
around abuse, harassment, child sexual abuse material, and copyright
infringement.
In part because this space is somewhat new and only just forming as a concept,
it was exciting to be a part of a task force, organized by the Atlantic
Council, over the last few months to explore what it means to create a
trustworthy future web. The task force brought together a wide variety of
experts studying all different aspects of the trust & safety world, from
industry, academia, the media, civil society and more.
On Wednesday, the task force released the output of the effort, a thorough
paper:
Scaling Trust on the Web. The full document clocks in at 150 pages,
but the main report is really just the first 50 or so pages, with six annexes
included that explore different specific areas, including things like building
better tooling for trust and safety, exploring the gaming ecosystem in
particular, and looking at trust & safety in a federated world (we just had a
podcast on this topic).
There’s also an annex on “respecting children as rights holders,” which does an
important job of flipping the terrible current narrative that seems to ignore
that children have rights themselves regarding the use of the internet, while
various politicians, often egged on by the media, keep pushing to take away the
rights of kids to make use of the internet.
There’s a lot in the report, but I think it’s an important step forward for
those who are actually looking to understand not just the concept of “trust &
safety,” but literally what it means to build a “trustworthy” web that enables
so much of the good things that made all of us excited to use the web in the
first place. And given just how many hysterical, hyperbolic reports we’ve seen
lately about the web being horrible or whatever, it’s nice to have a careful,
thoughtful, forward-looking report that is grounded in reality."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
