T&S workers are picking up the pen
I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.
This week, Ben and I share some new books coming out related to Trust & Safety and, more importantly, that will shape the public's understanding of what we do.
Also, if you have 10 minutes I'd appreciate you taking this survey from Musubi, the T&S company I work for. I'm seeing people in our industry equal parts empowered and burned out because of AI, and there's a lot of nuance that we're not talking about. I'd love to hear from you about how work is evolving and how you're feeling, so we can talk about this with some data behind it.
As always, get in touch if you have views on this week's T&S Insider, particularly if you have ideas about what I should write should write about next. Here we go! — Alice
Upcoming Thorn Webinar: AI, emerging harms, and online safety
Join us October 20 as Ruth Leemis, Senior Researcher at Thorn, shares what the latest findings from Thorn’s Youth Perspectives Report mean for trust and safety teams.
The session will cover the growing role of AI, why platforms need to account for young people accessing age-restricted spaces, and opportunities to better protect young users at scale.
Unpack what stood out to our researchers after surveying more than 1,000 young people.
Books that tell the world about Trust & Safety
A few weeks ago, as Jacob Coxon suddenly became a household name (EiM #354) and the debate about AI regulation moved into the political arena, Ben wrote the following (my emphasis):
These conversations, and this moment, are the exact time the general public need the exact expertise T&S professionals have spent years building. Most of the time, however, it's nowhere to be found.
Primarily, he was talking about how internet speech and safety practitioners were showing up in the media. And while that's an important space for people to be heard, I think he was forgetting a crucial way for how the general public comes to understand Trust & Safety and its related fields.
Books.
Books are powerful; they outlast the news cycle, go deeper than a single quote in a news story and become the frame that journalists and policymakers reach for when topics become contested and debate. In short, they matter.
Picking up the pen
However, for a long time, the general public has understood internet speech and safety mainly through academics and journalists. Much of that work has been valuable, but some would say it hasn't always yielded good outcomes.
Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation is a prime example. Described as "the book that birthed the social media ban", it has been criticised for — among other reasons — being written without knowledge about how to enforce a finely-worded policy or make a much-debated user ban call.
In fact, it's very telling that, when Mike and Ben did a special edition of Ctrl-Alt-Speech with their favourite books about online speech and safety, none of them were written by T&S practitioners. They were all written by (very good) lawyers, academics and journalists.
That might be changing, however. Ben and I have noticed a run of books that have been published in the last few months about internet safety and speech come from professionals actually making the difficult decisions and factoring in the trade-offs.