Cultivating the Next Generation of Trust & Safety Leaders - Future of Trust & Safety Insights
All Tech Is Human was privileged to host The Future of Trust & Safety, a landmark gathering of emerging and established Trust & Safety professionals on May 14, 2024, in New York City. The Future of Trust & Safety featured two panels focused on empowering the field.
The second panel, Cultivating the Next Generation of Trust & Safety Leaders, focused on career advice, how policy such as the Digital Services Act influences trust and safety operations, and what they think the future holds in store for the sector. It featured Eirliani Abdul Rahman (Former Twitter Council member & doctoral student, Harvard University), Alexis Camille Crews (Founder, E∙NOUGH Consulting), Jacob Silver (Senior Data & Implementation Officer, Oversight Board), Camille François (Senior Director for Trust & Safety at Niantic), and was moderated by Sandra Khalil (Associate Director, All Tech Is Human).After the panel, Matthew Soeth (Head of Trust & Safety and Global Affairs) took time to write key insights and highlights.
By Matthew Soeth
One of the fastest growing fields in tech sector is Trust & Safety. All Tech is Human has seen as much in our Responsible Tech Mentorship Program cohorts as aspiring professionals communicate Trust & Safety, or more broadly, responsible tech as a desired career goal. However, breaking into Trust & Safety, and developing relevant skills that are transferable to this space are not as clear. This is the challenge of an emerging industry that recently began to mature, gaining prominence during the early 2020’s as internet usage became ubiquitous. As Trust & Safety becomes a career path, there is a lot that we can do to nurture and grow this profession going forward.
Getting into Trust & Safety is a unique path for everyone who works in this space. Ask anyone who currently works in the field and they will share a similar story of how they snuck into this work through what appears to be a side door. I recently shared my own story detailing my work as an educator, starting a nonprofit focused around online safety and education for young people, several years before I joined TikTok’s global Trust & Safety team. During the panel, Camille François shared her journey from cybersecurity to Trust & Safety, indicating an “Alice in Wonderland” approach. Francois indicated curiosity was paramount, “One day I saw the rabbit. I thought it was fascinating. I followed that curiosity. I found the first cave. In my context, I was working on countering violent extremism, mostly with Google. And then I continued following my curiosity wherever it led wherever it led me.”
The Trust & Safety professionals I know are deeply curious and interested in solving complex problems. The best and worst of humanity can play out online, so having professionals who are good and working with nuance and looking at issues from different angles is a must.
Trust & Safety professionals must be great communicators. This makes sense as many Trust & Safety professionals need to have a high level of empathy in order to solve complex human problems. Communicating the need and process for solving these problems is a challenge at platforms as Trust & Safety intersects multiple teams with different communication styles. We work across policy, product, engineering, comms/marketing, and C-suite as we build out frameworks and show the need for the changes that need to happen to improve user experience. Eirliani Abdul Rahman explained the need to differentiate her communication style saying, “As a diplomat, I had to deal with, say, my president or the prime minister and then try and see how I can pitch something or communicate in a way that would actually target the audience, right?”
This transferable skill comes in handy when you quickly realize how engineering communicates vs policy vs c-suite is very different. All three of these groups have different communication styles and how you present your pitch will have a major impact on whether or not your project comes to fruition.
Another transferable skill is data science. The ability to read, interpret, and take action from data is central to Trust & Safety and often the first step when evaluating policy enforcement, platform trends, tooling, and platform resources. I was an English major in college, but I always had a knack for statistics and data analysis. Jacob Silver of the Oversight Board echoed this sentiment saying, “being able to work with a mix of structured and unstructured data is very common across lots of different industries. You don't have to become a technical person. That was a little bit of a skill set that I ended up leaning into.”
One consistency I’ve seen across the field of Trust & Safety over the years is a spirit of open collaboration. This was most prominent at conferences where professionals congregated, shared best practices, and asked questions about processes and procedures as it came to responding to new and emerging forms of online harms. Now, we are seeing conversations happen more frequently through professional orgs like the Trust and Safety Professionals Association, All Tech Is Human, and Integrity Institute, who are creating spaces to discuss, develop, and implement the best practices we are all discussing. There is a lot of value in building trust and in these professional relationships as we are all working together towards a common goal. As Alexis Crews highlights, “Focus on building an actual relationship with someone. As someone who's an introvert, I do not like networking. The irony. I have to be tactical. So think about how do you tactically build a relationship with someone, because you never know what's going to come from that.”
Over the years in my own professional network, I’ve encountered friends who have worked on similar policy issues I was tasked with solving, or may be working on something similar and we are able to share notes on our process. This groupthink is an essential part of improving online safety for everyone.
One last thing I’d like to recognize is the ongoing effort of the Trust & Safety community to foster and grow the next generation of professionals. There are great efforts to build up education programs, with support of professionals in the field, and create areas of study, like Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, to normalize the Trust and Safety industry as a viable career path. We also see concerted efforts from organizations like TSPA’s Coffee Chats and All Tech is Human’s Mentorship program to connect current with aspiring professionals. I encourage more professionals to get involved to help inspire and develop the next generation of the Trust & Safety workforce. Together, we can continue to make the internet a better place for humanity.
About All Tech Is Human
All Tech Is Human is a non-profit committed to building the world’s largest multistakeholder, multidisciplinary network in Responsible Tech. This allows us to tackle wicked tech & society issues while moving at the speed of tech, leverage the collective intelligence of the community, and diversify the traditional tech pipeline. Together, we work to solve tech & society’s thorniest issues.
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