TrustCon 2024: 5 Key Takeaways for Narrative Intelligence and Trust & Safety Experts

Every face has a name, and at TrustCon 2024, this sentiment truly resonates. TrustCon feels more like a camp, with speakers addressing dozens of topics, such as platform safety. TrustCon showcased the depth of the T&S community. It is an intriguing gathering of individuals from across the globe, diverse industries, and various sectors. These people come together to share insights and collaborate on the critical work of Trust & Safety (T&S), a field often misunderstood by those outside. This year’s Trust & Safety Conference, organized by the Trust & Safety Professionals Association (TSPA), highlighted the dynamic and multifaceted nature of T&S across organizations, industries, and problem spaces.

LEARN: What Is Narrative Intelligence?

Trust & Safety encompasses a broad range of practices to ensure online platforms and digital services are safe and trustworthy for all users. This includes content moderation, user protection, and the prevention of online harms such as cyberbullying, fraud, and the spread of harmful content and harmful narrative attacks. T&S teams do not just work at platforms; they work in civil society organizations, corporations, government, and regulatory arms, all committed to keeping digital world users safer online and ensuring the internal products they build and take to market are safe and in compliance. The product development cycle is the top of the funnel for all trust and safety work. Just as every organization has a narrative and every narrative has a counter-narrative, every product has an intended use, which is ripe with opportunities to misuse that product.

Narrative Intelligence involves understanding and analyzing the narratives that shape public perception and behavior. It intersects with Trust & Safety by identifying and mitigating the spread of harmful narratives, such as misinformation and disinformation. T&S teams use narrative intelligence to detect and counteract these threats, ensuring that digital platforms remain safe and credible. By leveraging advanced AI and machine learning, T&S professionals can track and reduce the risk of narrative attacks that could harm individuals or organizations.

TrustCon 2024: Navigating the Dynamic World of Trust & Safety

Despite the invaluable work T&S teams do, quantifying their value proposition remains a challenge. Internally, T&S practitioners need to demonstrate the effectiveness of their methodologies by moving key metrics from quantitative to qualitative. Proving the worth of a T&S team can be tough; when they are effective, the harms they prevent may go unnoticed. Leaders often need to track activities that tie into revenue-generating or cost-saving initiatives to justify their team’s ROI. No T&S team has ever been adequately resourced, and leaders share the same curiosity about tackling societal harms holistically. Hence, it is hard to allocate time to this when the volume of requests outweighs the capacity available. 

Working in T&S is highly dynamic, touching every corner of an organization. Practitioners come from varied backgrounds, including education, criminal justice, law, military, government, social work, and psychology. This diversity fosters creative approaches to the internet’s thorniest issues. While GPUs may be limited, creativity is boundless and often required. Our narratives, shaped by our experiences, guide us in addressing these complex problems. 

Here are the five key takeaways from TrustCon 2024:

The Value Proposition of Trust & Safety (T&S) Teams: Quantifying the impact of T&S teams remains a significant challenge. Despite their crucial role in preventing harm, their benefits are often invisible. Leaders need to find ways to measure the effectiveness of their work by aligning it with revenue-generating or cost-saving initiatives to justify their ROI. Additionally, resource allocation is a constant struggle as the volume of requests often exceeds the available capacity.

Diverse Backgrounds Fuel Innovation: T&S practitioners come from various fields, including education, criminal justice, law, military, government, social work, and psychology. This diversity drives innovative approaches to tackling complex internet safety issues. These professionals’ varied experiences and narratives are instrumental in devising creative solutions to their dynamic challenges.

Expanding Scope of T&S Roles: The role of T&S spans various sectors such as security, compliance, law enforcement, academia, engineering, sales, customer service, health, human services, human rights, journalism, government, think tanks, and intelligence. With the digital world becoming increasingly interconnected, the presence of T&S functions in companies has grown significantly. TrustCon highlighted this expansion with a diverse range of companies and 1,300 attendees across multiple tracks. This has grown substantially since its inception in 2022 when attendance was closer to 350. 

Resilience Amidst Challenges: T&S professionals are resilient despite facing daily challenges and the constant threat of job cuts. Their work is highly dynamic and involves collaboration across different sectors. Even with market shifts and layoffs, the commitment of T&S teams to their mission remains strong. TrustCon provided a platform for these professionals to share insights, foster camaraderie, and collaborate on solutions.

The Importance of Explainability and Human Element: As adversarial content dissemination becomes more sophisticated, companies are strongly urged to invest in explainability to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of T&S efforts. While AI offers promising enhancements such as improved well-being for content moderators and quicker insights for mitigation strategies, the human element remains indispensable. The collaboration between technology and human expertise is crucial for addressing the evolving threats in the digital landscape.

LEARN MORE: How to Combat Misinformation and Disinformation: Lessons from a Social Media Trust and Safety Expert

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The Expanding Role of Trust & Safety

T&S roles span security, compliance, law enforcement, academia, engineering, sales, customer service, health, human services, human rights, journalism, government, think tanks, and intelligence. As our interconnected world and digitized experiences grow, any company with consumers should have a T&S function. This industry’s expansion is evident in the increasing number of TrustCon attendees and the diversity of companies represented, as highlighted by TSPA’s Executive Director.

The industry makeup has evolved. While Trust and Safety may seem like a ‘platform problem,’ the companies that employ T&S practitioners have too evolved and expanded to all digital service providers who need to protect their customers and brand reputation. 

Voices Matter

Although the threats T&S teams face are familiar, their vectors have become multimodal, and the mechanisms of adversarial content dissemination have outpaced many internal operations’ capabilities. There was a strong call to action for companies to invest in explainability. This investment is crucial for improving our chances of getting it right when the ‘big one’ hits. While AI holds promise for enhancing outcomes—such as improving content moderators’ well-being, providing quicker insights for mitigation strategies, and allowing internal teams to focus on higher-risk items—the human element in T&S remains indispensable. Interventions applied are very localized, wherever these harm vectors can be automated and based on company values.

The Way Forward

Trust & Safety is marked by resilience, creativity, and a deep commitment to protecting the online information ecosystem. TrustCon 2024 underscored the importance of this work and the need for ongoing collaboration, innovation, and investment in technology and human expertise. As we navigate the complexities of social technology, the T&S community will be instrumental in making the internet safer.

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