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 (), listening to people trying to square this impossible circle.

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.