What TrustCon's agenda says about T&S in 2026

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.

We're hurtling towards the biggest T&S industry event of the year and that means it's my job to go through the agenda with a fine-tooth comb to see what it says about T&S in 2026.

Not only will I be leading a bunch of sessions at TrustCon next week (20-22 July) but I'll have some fun enamel pins to give out too. Grab me after a panel or for a mentorship coffee chat.

While IRL events like TrustCon are important, I realise there are many T&S folks who can't make it for all manner of reasons. I also want to hear from you too: What stopped you from going? What's on your mind? And what would be useful for me to share in forthcoming editions of T&S Insider?

Reach out either way. And thanks for reading T&S Insider, as ever — Alice

What's in (and out) at TrustCon this year

As many of you know, TrustCon is the largest Trust & Safety conference of the year and, according to Ben at least, is a “mix of Glastonbury and Davos for the Trust & Safety industry”.

The three-day event is organised by the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA), the industry association for T&S workers, which spends months reviewing proposals from a diverse group of T&S community members. The sessions that end up on the agenda tell us a lot about our industry and where it’s heading.

A caveat before I jump in: there are obvious limits to reading too much this snapshot of accepted proposals. This year was incredibly competitive for session submissions, and I know there isn’t room for everything. But I do see some themes that are worth discussing. 

P.S. In the spirit of transparency, I’ll discuss which of my own proposals were accepted and rejected, and how I see them fitting into the themes overall. I didn’t expect all of my proposals to be accepted, and I am truly excited about this year’s programming. It’s going to be a great TrustCon.

Practicality above all

Topics like ROI framing, crisis management, applying scarcity frameworks, and worker wellbeing are a thread running throughout the three-day agenda. The panel that I coordinated, and which was approved, is on another concrete, practical, fundable topic, that of minimum viable policy design for small teams.

This emphasis points to a field that is rapidly professionalising while still having to make the case for its own budget and headcount. These topics aren't the exciting emerging issues that AI or child safety represent, but they matter as much as ever. I’m glad that TSPA has recognised this: it's hard to have a conversation about the next paradigm while you're still fighting for resources in the current one.

AI is everywhere, obviously

As well as dedicated AI discussions, AI is interwoven through detection, child safety, operations, investigations, and enforcement panels. I’ve previously made the argument that T&S teams have been operationalising AI and automation for well over a decade, long before the current wave of executive excitement. That’s exactly why T&S professionals should be leading the AI conversation, and why I’m happy that the TrustCon programme reflects that. 

On top of that, panels on AI governance, tooling, and detection also refer to the big buzzword of the moment: agentic AI. I pitched a session on this very topic but was told that it wasn’t practical or specific enough. I respect the reviewers' preference for the concrete over the speculative, but equally, if TrustCon isn't the place to have the big conversation about where this is all heading, I don't know where is.

What else is missing 

• Content moderation: There’s a panel on surviving the "war on content moderation” which I’m very much looking forward to. But that is just one of a few panels discussing traditional content moderation — including topics like policy nuance for specific harm types, moderator decision-making, escalation, appeals and the "lawful but awful" grey zone. Most of this has become framed through the lens of AI/LLM enforcement — and how that changes the work — rather than as a policy topic in its own right. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
• Mis- and disinformation: Once a dominant track in T&S, mis- and disinfo only appears explicitly in two sessions out of hundreds. That’s a big change from even a few years ago. I submitted a panel on combating climate change misinformation but wasn’t accepted. 
• Hate and harassment: Hate speech and coordinated harassment, also both former core areas, are thin to the point of near-absence. I pitched a session on bias and hate in T&S systems, which was waitlisted while other sessions were confirmed. The closest thing I found on the agenda is a solo presentation on auditing AI bias in T&S operations, which has some overlap but is much narrower in scope than the panel I proposed. 
• Election integrity: Despite living in an extremely polarised political era, we don’t see much about it in the 2026 agenda at all. Unlike in 2020–2022, when it was top of mind for attendees, sessions about voter-suppression content policy, political ads transparency, coordinated inauthentic behaviour and results-delegitimization/"stop the steal"-type content are not part of the agenda. Where elections are featured, they've mostly been recast as either GenAI threats (deepfakes, synthetic media, and chatbots as the new voter-information front door). 

I find it interesting that all of these missing topics are acknowledged in my discussion panel with Nighat Dad from the Oversight Board but don’t have much collective space in the programme. These topics aren’t less important or prevalent than they were a few years ago, but the work behind them is getting defunded upstream, and the subjects have become legally and politically risky to take on in public. AI, child safety, and compliance are much more defensible and fundable, which is why they feature so strongly. Whether consciously or not, the TrustCon agenda reflects this new paradigm.