Online safety regulation as community policing
I'm Ben Whitelaw, the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation*. I'm dropping in for Alice in this week's Trust & Safety Insider.
A couple of weeks ago, I shared my thoughts about the challenges of regulators attending industry events. It prompted a flurry of emails and direct messages, including from a number of regulators themselves.
One EiM reader had a different take on how regulators should engage with the T&S community, and agreed for me to share it here. As ever, thoughts and pushback are welcome.
A reminder that there is no Week in Review this week as I'm on holiday. But the most pressing stories are nestled at the bottom of today's edition. Thanks for reading — Ben
Regulators at TrustCon? A response
Ailís Daly is head of Trust & Safety at WebPurify and host of the Trust Issues podcast. She has previously had T&S roles at TikTok, AirBnb and Twitter and is a qualified barrister.
Owen's diagnosis is right as far as it goes. Regulators do get stonewalled. The government relations function exists, in part, to stand between officials and the people who actually build and run Trust & Safety operations. And T&S teams genuinely are regulators' best allies inside these companies — nothing focuses a product roadmap like a legal obligation someone else wrote.
But collaboration is a two-way street, and the traffic has been moving in one direction. Practitioners are asked to be candid about what isn't working; meanwhile, regulators, understandably, stick to their published positions. I don't believe that to be anyone's bad faith. It's the product of institutional incentives on both sides — and it's worth naming because it limits what either side gains from being in the same room.
My consistent observation of European and UK regulators — as institutions, and as the individuals who work for them — is that they arrive at industry events with real constraints on what they can say. The brief is usually for them to listen rather than to speak. Which means much of what does get shared publicly stays close to material that has already been published, and practitioners hear a familiar version of it across different gatherings. It's rarely a window into how the regulator is actually thinking, what it's finding genuinely difficult, or where it knows it's operating at the edge of its expertise. The effect is to establish presence and to restate the consequences of getting things wrong.
Last year, at an off-the-beaten-track event that EiM co-hosted (a lovely, slightly dingy fourth-floor bar on Commercial Road, perhaps chosen because it was the kind of room where people might actually say what they think), I asked a regulatory staffer whether they were working on anything interesting. The answer, delivered plainly over screwtop Pinot Grigio (which I love FYI), was that they'd just issued a fine. It felt like cop talk. It also felt like a missed opportunity — is this how you build trust? And trust is the entire point of showing up.