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https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/31/everyone-hates-trust-safety-everyone-needs-trust-safety-this-is-a-problem/>
"Here’s the contradiction at the heart of the internet: everyone complains
about content moderation, but no one wants to use an unmoderated platform.
Everyone thinks trust & safety professionals are either censorial scolds or
corporate lackeys, but everyone expects them to magically solve the inherent
problems of human behavior at scale.
I spent last week at TrustCon, the premier annual conference for the trust and
safety industry (you can see our live podcast, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, here),
listening to people trying to square this impossible circle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7F5Rg-JA5o
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.
This is true elsewhere as well. City council meetings have rules. Your home
owners association has processes. The book club you’re in has some guidelines.
The idea is that in a society where groups form for common purposes, there
always need to be some sort of principles to help people get along without
causing damage. And each group can create their own rules and their own
enforcement—some may be stricter than others, but people get to decide which
sites and which services with which rules and enforcement they feel most
comfortable with, and use those.
A ton of trust & safety people legitimately care about making services work
better and be safer for everyone. For all the talk of how they’re “censors,” a
huge percentage of them come out of human rights and free speech work. For all
the talk of how they’re holding back progress, a ton of them are there because
they believe in the power of the internet to make the world better and are
trying to help.
And yet many people believe that trust & safety people are something they are
not. There are those, like Marc Andreessen (who as a board member for Meta and
many other internet companies
absolutely should know better), who believe
that trust & safety is “the enemy of progress.” Or there are those, like Jim
Jordan, who falsely believe that those keeping the internet safe are engaged in
a vast conspiracy of censorship for merely enforcing the rules on private
platforms.
But there are also those who seem to imagine too much power in the hands of
trust & safety professionals and expect them to fix the inherent problems of
humanity and society, something they could never do in the first place. We see
regulators who think that companies need to be forced into doing things because
their CEOs don’t care—but all that really tends to do is limit the ability of
trust & safety folks to craft better, more creative solutions to the problems
that human users bring to any service. Because as more government mandates come
down from on high, the more those companies are forced to start checking boxes
to show “compliance” rather than letting trust & safety experts actually figure
out what works best.
It is a thankless task, but a necessary task. It’s not about censorship or
holding back progress. Quite the opposite. It’s about making the wider internet
safer for more people so that more people can benefit from the internet.
And my takeaway from TrustCon is that it’s being made much, much harder by
those who don’t understand it."
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
