Why telling the T&S story is harder than it seems
I'm Ben Whitelaw, the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation*. I've commandeered the Trust & Safety Insider mic to talk about a topic that has been top of mind for many T&S professionals lately. Alice will be back next week in her usual slot.
Both Alice and I are in San Francisco this week for TrustCon, a gathering of many of the great and good of Trust & Safety. As well as recording an episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech — in your podcast feeds on Thursday — I'm taking the chance to speak to attendees about how they are feeling about the industry at a time when so much is happening. If you're here and want to say hi, drop me a line.
Get in touch with your thoughts — good, bad and ugly — about today's topic. Here we go! — Ben
New feature! Context Labels add more information to suspected CSAM.
As part of Thorn’s continued commitment to helping trust and safety teams detect and disrupt child sexual abuse material (CSAM), we're happy to announce that Safer now includes Context Labels, a new feature that provides additional signals for suspected CSAM.
These new Context Labels give trust and safety teams greater clarity when reviewing suspected CSAM by providing three predictive signals for nudity, apparent maturity, and sexual content. This gives your team more context during moderation, so you can:
- Triage content more efficiently
- Prioritize high-risk cases
- Make more informed moderation decisions
These labels can integrate into your existing moderation workflows to help your team filter, sort, and prioritize flagged content, whether you're using Safer directly or incorporating results into your own internal review tools.
Speaking out is a systems issue
There has been one particular T&S conversation that has been rumbling in the background for the last 12 months: to what extent should T&S professionals be telling the story of Trust & Safety, and, if so, how?
The germ of the debate was Casey Newton’s widely discussed Platformer essay last year, “Is anyone left to defend trust and safety?”. In it, he argued that more safety workers should speak to reporters, write op-eds and even quit their jobs in response to the dismantling of T&S functions and the layoffs of thousands of internet workers. Unsurprisingly, his argument wasn’t particularly well received and I’ve spoken to many people who felt it was an unfair expectation.
The topic reared its head again at the T&S Summit in London earlier this year, where several sessions I attended debated whether practitioners had a responsibility to explain their work more publicly in order to earn the trust of users, regulators and civil society. Some argued that the profession had become too invisible to defend either its record or its continued importance. Others questioned whether public visibility was desirable — or even compatible with work that often depends on discretion, confidentiality and protecting staff from abuse.
Anyone working in Trust & Safety — or following it from the sidelines — cannot have failed to notice that the field is under considerable pressure right now. Shrinking teams, increasing political scrutiny, growing regulatory obligations and AI upending decades of established safety norms has created uncertainty about what the profession is for and who sticks up for it.
Yet the recurring debate over who should be responsible for explaining its work and impact suggests the industry lacks a shared view of what the answer is, or indeed how it should be done. I expect the question to surface at TrustCon this week, as thousands of T&S professionals gather to discuss the future of the field.
Friction in the system
Over the past few months, I've spoken to people that sit within three groups that have some responsibility for telling that story:
- T&S professionals who have previously spoken out, expressed a desire to do so, or have some level of public presence;
- T&S comms professionals tasked with explaining the safety decisions that platforms make, and
- Journalists and other media professionals who report on, and try to make sense of, platform decisions.
The issue, I found, is not that T&S workers don’t want to speak out. Rather, each is part of a system that makes telling a complete, credible story surprisingly difficult.
The working framework below is my attempt to explain why, based on those informal conversations.