Trust, Safety, and the Internet We Share by Daniel, Maia Levy; Menking, Amanda; Savio, Marlyn;

Short description:

The book is an informative and provocative overview of online trust and safety that will influence how the trust and safety space develops and how trust and safety decisions are made. It brings together the voices of stakeholders so they can work together and learn from each other to create safer, more inclusive online spaces.

Long description:

Trust, Safety, and the Internet We Share: Multistakeholder Insights is both an informative and provocative overview of online trust and safety that will influence how the trust and safety space evolves and how trust and safety decisions are made. The book covers key aspects of the field, focuses on underrepresented voices, and explains how organizations in the field came together and what lessons they can offer. Examining the state of trust and safety as a field—as well as its history, current dynamics, and future––the book benefits:

• Prospective and current trust and safety professionals who want to learn more about the practice or learn from different perspectives.


• Regulators and non-profits whose work impacts and intersects with trust and safety in complex and material ways.


• Academic, industry, and civil society researchers undertaking related work or seeking to identify experts in the field.

The book also explores such specific subjects and geographies as gender-based violence, misinformation in Nepal, and the dilemmas posed by dangerous speech for trust and safety practitioners. It highlights the roles of such key actors as content moderators, different approaches on the tools used for trust and safety work, and actors that have shaped the field in different ways, including the media and Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs).

The future of the internet needs meaningful conversations among stakeholders. The book brings together the voices of these stakeholders so they can begin working together and learning from each other to create safer, more inclusive online spaces.

Table of Contents:

I. Making Trust and Safety Legible 1. Voices of Trust & Safety: Origins and Evolutions 2. The Trust & Safety Professional Association and Trust and Safety Foundation: An Oral History 3. Publishing Trust and Safety Research: Challenges and Opportunities 4. Trust and Safety as Philosophical Practice II. Community Moderation 5. Online Community Managers: Learning from the Original Trust and Safety Practitioners 6. Advantages and Challenges Around Community-Led Content Moderation Models from a Historical Perspective 7. Community Moderation and the Hidden Structures of Digital Safety III. The Trust and Safety Ecosystem 8. Dangerous Speech and Its Dilemmas 9. Trust and Safety Vendors: Looking Back and Forward 10. The Indispensable Role of BPOs in Trust and Safety 11. Trust and Safety and Human Rights: Bridging the Fields for Better Online Governance 12. The Three Eras of Content Moderation in the Media and What Comes Next 13. Prosocial Design in Trust and Safety 14. Fighting Terror with Tech: The Evolution of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism IV. The Global Majority 15. T&S and the Majority World 16. Misinformation in Nepal: Spread, Impact, and Media Dynamics 17. Trust and Safety’s Blindspots: A Latin American Perspective V. Support for Moderators, Users, Communities, and Practitioners 18. Wellbeing-Centered UX: Supporting Content Moderators 19. Beyond Content Severity: Rethinking Psychological Impact and Wellness Care for Moderators Working with “Benign” Content 20. Trust and Safety Tooling as a User Experience Challenge 21. Four Functional Quadrants for Trust & Safety Tools: Detection, Investigation, Review & Enforcement (DIRE) 22. Trust and Safety: An Approach to Countering Gender-based Violence VI. Trust and Safety in the Age of AI 23. Adversarial Shift in the Age of Generative AI: The Impact on Content Moderators and the Need to Accelerate the Defensive Use of Generative AI 24. Intersections Between Trust, Safety, and Responsible AI: How Trust & Safety and AI Auditing Can Learn and Evolve Together VII. Legal and Regulatory Perspectives 25. Online Safety Regulation: Righting Risks or Risking Rights? 26. Making Metrics Meaningful: A Regulatory Perspective on Effective Transparency Reporting in Online Safety 27. Dream, Design, Deliver: Singapore’s Approach to Online Safety Regulation