Sign in Subscribe
8 min read T&S Insider

Making the best of a T&S incident (part two)

A Trust & Safety crisis doesn’t just risk reputational damage — it grabs leadership’s attention too. That’s your moment to make the case for investment in your team. Here’s how I would turn a T&S incident into a strategic win.

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that Trust & Safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

Hello from London! I'm here for the Trust & Safety Summit and Marked as Urgent. I grew up not far from here, in Oxford, but haven't been back to England in many years, so everything is making me feel nostalgic. Ben was kind enough to give me a walking tour of London yesterday and, naturally, we took a selfie in front of the most quintessentially English thing we could find.

This week, I'm revisiting how to get buy-in for Trust & Safety, focusing on how to make the most out of a crisis to earn respect and support from the C-Suite when it really matters.

Get in touch if you'd like your questions answered or just want to share your feedback. Here we go! — Alice

Today’s edition is in partnership with Safer by Thorn, a purpose-built CSAM and CSE solution

Powered by trusted data and Thorn’s issue expertise, Safer helps trust and safety teams proactively detect CSAM and child sexual exploitation conversations.

Safeguard your platform and users with proprietary hashing and matching for verified CSAM and a classifier for finding possible novel CSAM. Plus, Safer’s new text classifier provides much needed signals to help trust and safety teams find conversations that violate your child safety policies, such as those containing sextortion or requests for self-generated content from a minor.

SEE HOW IT WORKS

Don't put a good crisis to waste

Why this matters: When a Trust & Safety incident hits, it’s not just your users who notice — your C-suite will want to know how it happened and what to do about it. This is rare opportunity that you don't want to miss: the spotlight is on T&S and senior leaders want to know how to avoid a repeat situation. That’s when most platform professionals can — and should — make the case for investing in Trust & Safety. Here’s how to turn a crisis into a catalyst for change.

In Part One, I talked about getting buy-in from exec teams for Trust & Safety before an emergency. Unfortunately, that’s not how things mostly get done.

T&S investment decisions happen in times of crisis and when there’s an exponential risk to the brand/reputation, usually because of bad press. At that point, someone important usually notices — even after T&S folks have been ringing alarm bells for a while — and suddenly resources are made available.

There are a number of problems with this approach: 

Get access to the rest of this edition of EiM and 200+ others by becoming a paying member


Published by:

Alice Hunsberger

You might also like...

Dec
08

Why remote T&S jobs have all but disappeared

As companies pull workers back to expensive hubs and the US moves to restrict visas, the T&S field risks losing the very expertise and global perspectives it depends on. The fourth part of the Safe for Work? series.
7 min read
Dec
01

What if the entry-level T&S apocalypse hasn't happened? (yet)

The narrative says that junior T&S roles have disappeared. In reality, some still exist. But — as this third instalment of the Safe for Work? series shows — they've concentrated in companies far from the US platforms that everyone watches.
6 min read
Nov
12

The most secure job in T&S might just be compliance

In the first edition of the Safe for Work? series, we deep-dive into a new T&S career path that's more than likely to survive the next round of layoffs (or the one after that)
6 min read
Nov
04

Introducing Safe for Work? — all about T&S jobs

This new T&S Insider series will look at the T&S job market in 2025 and unpack what it means for people who want in (or out)
3 min read
Oct
28

Can anyone do T&S work for 20 years?

Is Trust & Safety a career for life — or a job that burns people out before they get there? The reaction to a viral LinkedIn post suggests many experienced professionals are starting to wonder the same.
5 min read