How to incorporate safety by design into your T&S strategy
I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that Trust and Safety professionals need to know about to do their job.
Over the last 12 months, I've produced a set of guides to help T&S teams — both big and small — make better decisions, build more effective systems and navigate the realities of modern safety work. You can see them all in one place here. Today, I’m sharing my latest on an area that has got a lot more focus: product safety.
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The latest Thorn research shows why platform safety strategies need to account for how minors actually use digital products — not just how those products are intended to be used.
Nearly half of minors surveyed said they had accessed a platform before meeting its minimum age requirement. More than a quarter reported an online sexual interaction. And AI is increasingly part of the safety journey: 15% said they turned to an AI chatbot or companion for advice afterward.
For leaders across social, gaming, dating, generative AI, and other UGC platforms, these findings raise important questions about product design, moderation, reporting, and AI governance.
My guide to reviewing risky features before they launch
It's become a running joke among T&S professionals that they first hear about a new feature when it's about to ship and sometimes after it's already live.
Over the last five years, this has become even more pronounced. The combination of T&S layoffs and the adoption of AI coding tools means that shipping features has got faster and teams are adding safety measures as MVPs rather than a fully thought-out plan.
There are two reasons that approach doesn't work in the long run:
- Costs: Fixing a design problem through moderation, after the fact, costs far more than fixing the design. Default settings, extra steps, how easy something is to find, how reporting works, and who can contact whom all shape how much abuse a platform sees before a single moderator opens a queue.
- Compliance: Regulation is adding impetus and pressure for platforms to do more upstream to keep users safe. For example, Digital Service Act risk assessments for the largest platforms, duties under the UK's Online Safety Act, and the Australian eSafety Commissioner's Safety by Design framework.
That said, if you pitch investment in T&S solely as cost-saving or compliance, there's a risk that you get paperwork instead of product changes. Product teams are measured on speed and growth, so implementing safety reviews is always going to feel like slamming on a brake.
This guide covers how to build the kind of product review process that engineering and product teams can actually get on board with, including a lighter version for small teams.
What good looks like
Safety by design means thinking about safety while a feature is still an idea. In practice, it involves someone owning the idea, capturing all the potential risks, matching fixes to those risks, and checking to see what happened post-launch.
Important note: product safety works hand in hand with effective moderation. It prevents user harm before it happens, before moderation processes — automated and human-actioned — handle the rest. I'm a firm believer that platforms need both, but historically product safety has been neglected by platforms. I'm pleased to see that's changing.
Let's start with the cadence at which T&S teams are involved in product development. I'd say there are three common approaches: