It's time to take user education seriously
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, a special edition about user education co-written with my T&S bff, Rachel Kowert, who you may know from her Psychgeist newsletter or YouTube channel of the same name. We're co-hosting a workshop at the Trust & Safety Summit in London soon if you want to see us in person. I'll also be speaking on a panel on the last day of the summit. If you're there, come and say hi!
As always, get in touch if you have thoughts or questions about today's edition. Here we go! — Alice
The Trust & Safety Summit is just one week away, bringing the global T&S community together at Novotel London West, and this is your last opportunity to secure a pass before registration closes.
As the premier event for Trust & Safety leaders, this year's program dives into the modernisation of T&S: from AI adoption and evolving team structures to political pressures, regulatory enforcement, and the new realities shaping online safety. You'll hear from leaders at Uber, OpenAI, 2K, Match Group, and many more.
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Safety without user education is pointless
By Alice Hunsberger and Dr. Rachel Kowert
Ask any T&S professional working at a platform to describe their programme and they'll talk about policy (what the rules are) and tooling/operations (how the rules are enforced). These two pillars of the T&S Triforce are most legible to leadership because they're quantifiable; for example, violations actioned, appeals resolved, and response times logged. This also means they get the budget, headcount, and attention.
T&S user education rarely gets the same treatment. It shows up in the form of a help centre nobody reads or a "digital literacy initiative" that lives perpetually on the backlog. It's not that T&S leaders think education is unimportant; it's that it's genuinely hard to measure and easy to deprioritise — the classic "important but not urgent" project.
But the research actually shows that community guidelines that users understand can be a stronger predictor of healthier community behaviour than moderation efforts alone. Education isn’t less important than policy or tooling, so why is it given less time and resources?
"Digital literacy" has become meaningless
"Digital literacy" has become one of those phrases that sounds important enough that nobody pushes back on it, but vague enough that nobody actually does anything about it either. People mention it in grant proposals or policy briefs and it signals that they care about users, but it often doesn't include enough detail about what digital literacy actually means in practice.
The problem is that digital literacy looks completely different depending on who you're trying to reach, and in what context. A parent asking how much screen time is too much needs something different than a teenager navigating their first experience with online harassment, which is different again from a community moderator trying to figure out how to handle a mental health crisis in their Discord server.