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.

This week, I’m looking at two different data sources that both highlight the same reality: T&S teams are juggling allll the things. Feeling stretched thin? You’re definitely not alone.

I’d love to hear how you manage the reality of juggling dozens of priorities — and any practical tips you’ve found that make it easier. Hit reply or read on for more about what I’m asking. Here we go! — Alice

How to manage infinite priorities

When I ask Trust & Safety leaders what they're focusing on, I never get a simple answer. There's no overwhelming single priority that dominates everyone's attention. Instead, it's always a mix of:

• AI implementation
• Regulatory compliance
• Scaling challenges
• Workforce development
• Tooling needs
• Policy updates
• And about fifteen other things, all happening simultaneously.

In my own experience leading T&S teams, this was true as well. I'd stack rank my top priorities, work through incremental improvements across all of them, and then start back at the top again. Nothing was ever truly "solved"; it was an ongoing and never-ending process.

Why? It's partly because "perfect" doesn't exist in Trust & Safety, but also because the target is always moving. New regulations appear overnight, bad actors change tactics, societal expectations shift, emerging technology creates new possibilities and new risks.

This pattern held true when I looked at two different surveys I've conducted about T&S priorities and challenges. Despite using completely different methods and reaching different audiences, they both point to the same conclusion: we're trying to do everything, all the time.

What the data tells us #1

You may remember last year's EiM reader survey, in which we asked about which T&S topics that readers are interested or directly involved with. The results of one multiple choice questions hint at just how broad people's day-to-day work really is.

Content moderation and appeals (45%) topped the list, which makes sense, since that's what most companies hire T&S people to do. But eight different topic areas clustered between 30-45%, including Trust and safety tooling (38%) AI and machine learning (30%) and Community standards and governance (also 30%).

That's a lot of hats to wear and things to think about.

What the data tells us #2

Recently, I asked for informal feedback from people downloading a playbook I'd written for my work at Musubi. I asked a simple, open-ended question: "What is your biggest challenge in Trust & Safety right now?"

The responses were fascinating. Instead of clear themes emerging, I got dozens of different challenges spanning everything from "keeping up with AI advancements" — AI was a hot topic, unsurprisingly — to "proving ROI to executives" to "managing burnout" to "integrating new tooling" to "government pressure". Yes, it was a self-selecting group taking advantage of a free text box but it was a familiarly wide-range of topics.

When I combined and clustered the themes from both datasets, the general pattern held true. There is no overwhelming priority or single area of focus that T&S professionals are dedicated to. Everyone is having to think about everything, everywhere, all at once.

It goes without saying that this is hard. The cognitive load of keeping all these priorities active simultaneously, knowing that progress in one area can’t come at the expense of maintaining standards in others, is tough work. The teams I've led often asked me for tips on how to context-switch successfully, and noted it as a main cause of stress.

It is essentially the worst of both worlds: tough to achieve anything, but easy to burn out.

The fundamental question

Here's my question to you, T&S Insider readers: Is this priority scatter a problem we need to solve, or is it simply the nature of Trust & Safety work?

Is it because T&S teams are under-resourced and stretched too thin, forcing us to do surface-level work across too many areas instead of deep, strategic work in focused domains? Is it because companies don't understand the work well enough to help us prioritise effectively? Is it unique to this particular moment in internet history, when regulation, AI, and political pressure are all converging to create unprecedented complexity?

Or has Trust & Safety always been like this? Have we always been the function expected to handle "everything that could go wrong with people interacting online" (which, as it turns out, is pretty much everything)?

Whatever the answer, I think it means is that we need to think more carefully about how to get better at thriving in complexity, rather than wondering what to prioritise. This might look like:

• Clustering related work into themed sprints to ease the burden of context switching
• Cross-training team members so knowledge isn't siloed and folks can flex between focus areas
• Change management training to help employees embrace new ideas and inputs rather than fear them
• Creating organisational memory systems/knowledge bases so folks don't have to always start at zero
• Building slack time into resourcing and team schedules to accommodate the inevitable "surprise, here's a new crisis that needs immediate attention" moments.

It also means getting comfortable with "good enough for now" solutions rather than perfect ones. Perfect solutions take too long and often mean that things shifted by the time you get around to implementing them. Acknowledging this reality, rather than fighting it, might be the first step toward doing the work more sustainably.

We're still in the early stages of figuring out what it actually means to be a profession that exists at these intersections. The internet will always evolve faster than we can build institutional knowledge. We shouldn't be asking whether we're doing T&S "right" or "wrong," but instead if we're building the right kind of muscle for work that will always require juggling everything at once.

Over to you...

Also worth reading

Takeaways from TrustCon and the evolution of Trust & Safety (All Tech Is Human Youtube)
Why? A great conversation on current themes in T&S with Alisar Mustafa (Duco) and Theodora Skeadas (DoorDash) with moderator Sandra Khalil (All Tech Is Human)

493 Cases of Sextortion Against Children Linked to Notorious Scam Compounds (Wired)
Why? "Scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos have conned people out of billions. New research shows they may be linked to child sextortion crimes too."

Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info (Reuters)
Why? An interesting look at how Meta planned on drawing the line with genAI content.

Large language models are cultural technologies. What might that mean? (Programmable Mutter)
Why? "We should not think of Large Language Models (LLMs) as 'intelligent, autonomous agents' paving the way to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but as cultural and social technologies." This post explores various ways to approach that idea.