Why remote T&S jobs have all but disappeared
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, Ben and I continue our Safe for Work? series, where we discuss remote work in Trust & Safety — or rather, the lack thereof.
The situation is made more complex by last week's alarming news of H1B visas being denied to T&S workers. My post about this on LinkedIn is the most viral post I’ve ever had, and as a result a lot of people have reached out to me to talk about this. It’s been heartbreaking to hear from people who are scared for their jobs and livelihoods, or those of their colleagues and friends.
Get in touch if you'd like your questions answered or just want to share your feedback. Here we go! — Alice
Resolver is celebrating 20 years of online safety & the launch of AI CSAM service.
To mark that milestone, listen to the recent episode of the brilliant Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast featuring Resolver's Head of Trust & Safety, George Vlasto.
George discusses Resolver’s 20-year evolution from a "scrappy" start to becoming a global leader in online safety intelligence. Learn about our problem-focused approach to emerging harms and the technology behind it.
The highlight: A deep dive into Athena, our groundbreaking AI service trained with unique government data to automatically detect and classify the vast majority of previously unseen (unknown) CSAM. Discover how this new capability is setting a higher standard for child protection worldwide.
Where did all the remote jobs go?
When Ben and I started this series on the current state of the T&S job market, we didn't plan to write about remote versus in-office work. But the responses we got made it clear that the shift away from remote work is one of the most significant and painful changes happening in T&S right now.
While this trend broadly mirrors the tech industry’s post-COVID return-to-office push, it’s affecting T&S workers further up the career ladder more acutely than others. Anh Ly's comment on LinkedIn captured what a lot of mid-to-senior practitioners are dealing with right now:
"My personal experience is that most of child safety roles and generally T&S roles I was looking at and wanted to apply for are no longer remote-friendly. Even hybrid in NYC or Austin or Bay Area means we still need to live in those areas instead. It makes it harder for mid-senior level practitioners (who moved during covid when remote was all championed) with family and kids to apply for. I understand the need in T&S to be together, but it doesn't make me want to uproot my family and figure out new schools, new housing again. Given the waves of layoffs in tech, relocating seems to be a bigger risk when being laid off has a much higher chance these days."
While frontline content moderation and BPO roles have always been tied to physical office environments, non-BPO roles — directors, PMs, policy specialists, engineers — proved they could work effectively from anywhere during the pandemic. In fact, many built their lives around that assumption.
But, as big companies concentrate teams back into office spaces in expensive hub cities, those workers face a new and sudden pressure: relocate, endure long commutes, or accept fewer job options in an already unstable market.
The geography of T&S roles
We went back to the Trust & Safety Jobs Board to see if people's anecdotal experience matched the numbers. We don't have year-on-year benchmarks, but the data for roles advertised between February to September 2025 showed that a whopping 91.1% of all new Trust & Safety job listings were onsite-only.
We also found 41% of those onsite-only jobs are concentrated in US cities with other major tech hubs — Singapore (9%), Ireland (8%), India (6%) and UK (5%) — making up another third of roles. That leaves the final third of onsite roles split across the rest of the world, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Portugal, and Greece, to name just a few.
Based on this data, if you want the best chance at being hired in T&S right now, you'll likely need to be in (or willing to relocate to) one of these regional hubs. Which just isn't possible for some people.
These hubs aren’t just where the jobs are, either — they’re where the professional ecosystem lives. The major cities in these countries offer far more opportunities for personal and career development: happy hours, panels, talks, networking events, even full conferences. If you're job hunting and want to meet hiring managers, build relationships, and hear about openings before they're posted, being in those cities gives you a real advantage. Which is a double whammy for folks that aren't.
A great time to hire for T&S talent
The data shows that fully remote T&S roles are now rare — and the few that do exist are extremely competitive. That’s discouraging for job seekers, but it’s an opportunity for companies willing to invest in remote Trust & Safety teams.
The current job market is saturated with experienced practitioners who either can’t or won’t relocate to expensive tech hubs. Many have years of expertise, deep domain knowledge, language skills, and cultural fluency — yet they’re effectively shut out of roles that require in-office presence. For companies like Airbnb, Thumbtack, Yubo, Reddit, and Pinterest, which appear as top remote hirers in our dataset, tapping into that distributed talent is clearly the strategy.
Remote roles also broaden access to people who are often excluded from traditional office-based work: caregivers, people with disabilities or who are neurodivergent, those living in lower-cost regions, and international workers who can’t secure visas. In a market where women and people of colour are being disproportionately affected by layoffs and leaving the workforce at alarming rates, remote options aren’t just a perk — they’re essential.
When T&S jobs are concentrated in a handful of high-cost cities, we lose such diverse perspectives. Harm occurs across languages, cultures, and identities and a T&S workforce clustered in San Francisco and New York will inevitably miss patterns, behaviours, and risks that a more geographically and culturally diverse team would catch.
For organisations that can offer remote work — and especially those building a remote-first culture where the whole company, not just T&S, operates that way — the upside is clear: access to a deep, overlooked talent pool that the biggest platforms are leaving on the table.
The H-1B complication
If that wasn't hard enough, just last week, the Trump administration threw another spanner into the mix: Trust & Safety workers will now be rejected for US H-1B visas.
An internal State Department memo stated that “anyone involved in 'censorship' of free speech [should] be considered for rejection." In Trump terms, that means anyone working on fact-checking, content moderation, online safety, trust and safety, and combating misinformation and disinformation — even Digital Services Act or Online Safety Act compliance work (a field which, as we just discussed, is one of the only steady and expanding areas of Trust & Safety).
This policy is as unacceptable as it is unsurprising. Diversity of experience and perspective makes Trust & Safety teams stronger and is widely believed to improve outcomes. It’s one of the reasons I love working in this field. And it goes without saying that the argument that T&S work is censorship is beyond backwards. Trust & Safety work protects speech and allows for diverse groups of people to co-exist.
We don't have data on how many people currently working in T&S in the US are on H-1B visas, but this policy change could shift where certain types of T&S work get done, potentially shifting some roles (particularly ones with language requirements less likely to be held by US citizens) away from the US — or maybe even to remote.
Is remote gone for good?
As a long-time advocate of remote work, I'm skeptical of the justifications for returning to the office. We're told these mandates support collaboration or mentorship, with productivity gains framed as a bonus. But after more than a decade leading and working on high-performing remote teams, that simply doesn’t match my experience.
The real drivers behind return-to-office policies are often more complex: “back-channel layoffs,” propping up expensive real estate, enabling micromanagement and increased surveillance, or serving as a last-ditch attempt to buoy stock prices. None of these are genuinely about supporting workers.
I know that remote work isn’t returning as the default — that ship has sailed with the broader tech industry’s push back to the office. But the way this shift is unfolding in T&S in particular — through geographic concentration, an abundance of senior expertise, and visa restrictions — leaves us with a less resilient, less diverse, and ultimately less effective ecosystem.
That’s a significant loss, not just for T&S practitioners, but for everyone who relies on their work to stay safe online.
You ask, I answer
Send me your questions — or things you need help to think through — and I'll answer them in an upcoming edition of T&S Insider, only with Everything in Moderation*
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