Building a Career in Trust & Safety: Matt Soeth’s Personal Journey
How did Matt Soeth, our Head of Trust & Safety and Global Policy, make his way into the field of Trust & Safety?
by Matt Soeth, All Tech Is Human Head of Trust and Safety & Global Policy
Similar to many Trust & Safety professionals, Matt followed a non-linear career path. It includes education, founding a nonprofit focused on digital citizenship, working on TikTok’s Trust & Safety team, and leading the Trust & Safety work for Spectrum Labs. Read about his journey below!
When I graduated college, a tech career did not appear to be an option. I was an English Major. My biggest claim to being good at tech was that I was the most technically skilled English Major in my program; Meaning, if someone needed help recovering a password, resetting a router, connecting to a printer, or building a website, I was the person they would call.
Fun fact: I played basketball in college. To be fair, I was a very good backup player (at 6’4” I was the short guy). However, being the tech person, one of my jobs each day was to come into the office and help my coach log into his email and access voicemail messages. I even created our first team highlight films using a brand new software called FinalCut. It took two hard drives to finish a 20-minute video and was still way more efficient than recording VCR to VCR. That is what it meant to be the tech guy.
This trend continued into my education career. I was the first teacher with a project using PowerPoints and blogs, building websites, encouraging students to create presentations, thinking about lesson design, delivery, and how tech could enhance the teaching and learning experience.
Personally, I continued to be people’s “tech” guy. If you needed help resetting a password, solving a password glitch, getting rid of a computer virus, or accessing a website, people came to me. However, something else changed in this window: social media. The early days of MySpace and the influx of phones that could send and receive text messages were consuming students' lives. Now I was getting hit with a barrage of new questions. There wasn’t a lot of education policy around cell phones and cell phones aside from, no, not allowed, or getting treated as an off-campus problem. This led to tons of in-school discipline issues, distracted students, and much more.
During the emergence of cell phones, I learned about the possibility of a Trust & Safety career. The field was different across platforms. Most of my discussions were with public policy teams. Those were external-facing roles that developed marketing and awareness campaigns more than they worked on internal platform safety. The teams working on actual safety like writing and enforcing policy and ensuring illegal content was not live on the various platforms were small and often disconnected from public-facing roles.
It was a great time to work on complex problems, develop unique solutions to nuanced online issues, and try to make the world a better place. If this sounds a little too “glass half full”, well, it is. You’ll want to be an optimistic person to work in Trust & Safety. The belief we can do better and continue to push in a forward direction is a skill that will help you thrive in this space. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be critical of tech or the work being done (or not done); but it’s much more productive than being cynical.
It was at this time that I started networking. I wanted to learn answers to questions that were eating me up. How are platforms dealing with complex social issues? Who are the teams working on online safety? What are their roles? How are platforms thinking about safety? What are terms of service and why are they so long?
I was already doing this work in schools helping with local policy around devices, tech, investigations, working with law enforcement, and educating students. Much of what I eventually did when I entered the tech industry. The challenge? My work was a small piece of a much larger problem of scale, and I wanted to solve that problem. Over the next few years, I went to conferences, spoke with professionals in and around tech (think: NGOs, content experts, and so forth). It was during this time of collaboration that I was invited to join the Twitter Advisory Board, attended advisory meetings for a few other platforms, collaborated on some US and Global projects around youth and online safety, and slowly started to build up a network of good friends, smart professionals, and hardworking online safety experts very similar to myself. We were all asking the same big questions and thinking of ways to help make the system better.
It was about this time when Musical.ly was acquired by Bytedance and became TikTok. Someone who I had worked with in the years leading up to the acquisition became the new Head of Trust & Safety at TikTok. I inquired about a role, and after a month and a half of interviews, I made it to the tech side.
I’ve developed a list of learnings from my time trying to break into tech and what I saw when I was finally working in tech. Trust & Safety is full of rewarding work with some of the best humans in the world who are making daily impacts on the way we interact with other humans online.
1. Persistence is key
I applied to many different roles in tech while I was still teaching (once I learned these roles existed). What I didn’t know is that the roles were across different teams looking for key experiences. I would submit my resume to a product development team for a policy role, but they would see I only had experience writing education policy with no product experience. I was denied. Knowing how to write a resume for the role you want and making sure it’s on the team in the area you have expertise is key.
2. Market yourself
I applied to 10 roles before I was hired at TikTok. The most common thing I heard was, “We think you’re a great teacher, but as an educator, we don’t think you can keep up with the pace of work at a tech platform.” This dumbfounded me as I was working 10+ hours per day as part of student leadership programs, writing and enforcing policy, assisting with police investigations, and more. Stay focused, don’t get discouraged, and develop strong strategies to market yourself.
3. Be prepared to pivot
After I started working in tech, the most common thing I hear now is, “Oh, you were an educator, we love that, you must be so good at design and understanding human behavior.” Oh, how the tables turned.
4. Build a network
Your network matters. Find good people who like solving complex problems and working on the things you like to work on as well. They will become your best friends in this space.
5. Find mentors
No one gets anywhere without a mentor. There are a lot of great mentors out there. The thing about Trust & Safety, most of us are trained not to brag about our work. We are just doing our job. While you may see a lot of “big names” on social media and in the news discussing trust and safety issues, there are people in the trenches who are just as knowledgeable and not as visible. Check out All Tech is Human’s Mentor program, TSPA Coffee Chats, and the T&S Mentor Match for ways to connect with a mentor in this space.
6. Attend conferences
This one could be tough due to funds or geographic restrictions, but there are a lot of accessible virtual content available, including the Family Online Safety Institute (available on YouTube). Looking for something more interactive, check out the virtual Trust & Safety Hackathon happening online April 22-23, 2024. Find ways to engage, learn, and grow. All Tech is Human is constantly pushing out webinars and in-person events. Our programming is a great way to connect and engage live or on a schedule that fits your life.
7. Find people on the inside
As you get to know people, ask to get an internal recommendation for a role. Every platform has this opportunity. Someone who already works there can submit a form to HR and “elevate” your application.
One important note: if you meet someone for the first time, do not let your first question be, “Can you help me get a job where you work?” Humans like being helpful but hate being used.
8. Study the field
Read. There is a ton of research and history about the world of Trust & Safety. You can start by looking at what current Trust & Safety professionals are sharing on their social feeds. Some good examples of people to follow include Alice Hunsberger, Katie Harbath, Theos Evgeniou, and Jeff Dunn. It’s a good way to identify what is relevant and current and see how current professionals are keeping an eye on the space. In the meantime, be sure to check out The Santa Clara Principles, Custodians of the Internet by Tareleton Gillespie, and The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet by Jeff Kosseff.
9. Get obsessed
There are great open-source education materials to help your Trust & Safety journey made available by the Stanford Internet Observatory. Additionally, there are graduate-level courses you can take at many universities in the U.S. with new programs being developed each year. Remember point six: you don’t always need to pay for an education to get one.
10.When you can’t find the front door, go through the side door
Not all great careers in tech start in tech. Think about tech-adjacent pathways. If you’re having a hard time breaking into Trust & Safety consider roles at orgs that tech platforms often collaborate with when it comes to policy, platform tooling, research, and so forth. There are a ton of great roles where you get to work directly with platforms in an advisory capacity. This is a great way to build content expertise in issue areas like hate speech, child safety, media literacy, or suicide and self-harm. Or, you can build your knowledge of tooling and reporting workflows through research and collaboration as a service provider. There are many ways to get to the same destination.
Throughout my professional career I’ve tried to live by a few guiding principles: add value wherever I go, be authentic, and do my best to contribute to the greater good. I hope this article was helpful and added some value to your search and desire to work in trust & safety. It’s not for everyone, but it is rewarding work and an incredibly wonderful problem to solve. It’s going to take a lot of great technologists, philosophers, and even some English majors to make it happen.
Trust & Safety Resources
Three Trust & Safety books to read…
The Santa Clara Principles (version 1 & 2)
Custodians of the Internet by Tareleton Gillespie
The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet by Jeff Kosseff
Three Trust & Safety focused newsletters to subscribe to…
Everything in Moderation (both Ben & Alice share unique newsletters)
Three Trust & Safety upskilling opportunities…
Becoming a Digital Trust & Safety Leader, LinkedIn Learning
The Trust & Safety Library by TSPA
TRUST & SAFETY ACTIVITIES BY ALL TECH IS HUMAN
Read All Tech Is Human’s Trust & Safety knowledge hub
Apply to join All Tech Is Human’s Trust & Safety working group
Apply to our next mentorship cohort, where you can be mentored by Trust & Safety professionals.
Apply to attend The Future of Trust & Safety, a curated gathering on May 14 in NYC.
Join our Slack community (8k members across 90 countries)