Should regulators attend TrustCon?

I'm Ben Whitelaw, the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation*. I'm standing in again for Alice in this week's Trust & Safety Insider.

This week, I've got some help from Owen Bennett, a friend of EiM and former head of international online safety policy at the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom. We've been chatting about whether regulators should attend TrustCon — and how they should show up. I thought EiM readers would be interested to hear a little from both sides before weighing in.

So, should regulators be more visible at T&S industry conferences, or does their presence make frank discussion harder? Don't hold back, get in touch — I'll share responses in a future edition of EiM — Ben

TrustCon’s regulators moved into the background

The case for showing up

Owen Bennett is an independent expert in online safety policy, and was until recently, Ofcom’s head of international online safety. In his role there, he was responsible for figuring out whether and how the UK regulator showed up in spaces like TrustCon.

A perennial complaint of online safety regulators is that they never get straight, substantive answers from tech companies on the risks that the companies face and the steps they're taking to address them.

Blame for this usually falls on the companies’ government relations teams, whose real job, regulators grumble, is to keep officials away from the internal trust & safety professionals who actually manage risk and implement protections.

But the benefit of engaging with internal T&S teams extends beyond the filling of knowledge gaps. From Dublin to Singapore, the view within the emerging cohort of online safety regulators is that T&S teams are their most powerful ally in shifting corporate tech culture. Simply put, formal rulebooks give long-suffering T&S teams the internal clout and leverage to make safety a corporate priority.

One would expect, then, that regulators would have swarmed TrustCon in California last week. It's the preeminent global gathering for T&S professionals, and a space for open, frank conversation with the community about emergent safety risks and solutions. Yet while regulator attendance had steadily ticked up over the years, the trend appears to have stalled: fewer agencies showed up this year, and in contrast with previous instalments, no online safety regulator appeared on programmed panels.

Tighter budgets and optics concerns around international travel (these are public bodies after all) explain the smaller presence. But with T&S professionals remaining key to regulators' success, showing up at TrustCon — to build trust and understanding — should be a non-negotiable for officials.

Why telling the T&S story is harder than it seems

Trust & Safety’s difficulty explaining itself reflects deeper tensions between the people doing the work, comms teams tasked with protecting company reputation and the journalists trying to hold platforms to account.

Everything in Moderation*Ben Whitelaw

The case for keeping a low profile

Ben Whitelaw is the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation. He has been to TrustCon three times, including this year. 

Two years ago, when I last attended TrustCon, the regulators were out in force. I knew that partly because there were far more British and Australian accents in San Francisco than I had expected. Ofcom and the eSafety Commissioner had certainly not stayed away, while the agenda featured more than 20 sessions on compliance, transparency and online safety legislation.