Today is Safer Internet Day — and in just a few days it will be Valentine’s Day. Which got me to thinking: just as we should be celebrating the ones we love not just on Valentine’s Day but all year long, we should be committing to make the Internet safer, all year long...and preferably into the next decade.
Spectrum Labs may have created truly effective, predictive technology for blocking bad behavior, but we’re just one part of the equation. We can’t do it alone. So today we are announcing a multi-tiered effort to better understand what’s happening on online platforms, and asking our peers, partners and users to join us.
We are inviting online platforms and communities of all sizes to commit to returning the Internet to a place of healthy connection, free from hate speech, harassment, predators and trolls — beyond just the hashtags of a single day.
As part of our Safer Internet Day pledge, we are inviting:
- Companies with online communities to commit at least 1% more of budget spend to Trust & Safety;
- Users, moderators, and Trust & Safety leaders to help show what online toxicity really looks like — by sending in the sh*tty things they’ve received online, on any platform to saferinternet@getspectrum.io. Spectrum Labs will compile those images (redacted on request, and kept anonymous) and incorporate them into our State of Trust & Safety Report — to share with media, regulators and municipal, state and federal officials.
In today’s environment, companies have to emphasize growth — which we understand completely. But we believe that a healthier, safer platform actually leads to better growth, engagement and retention. With this pledge, we’re simply drawing a line under that, asking companies to step up their investment in trust and safety by as little as one percent, but preferably more. Invest in technology, or people (like the content moderators who spare us all from horror, every day), or whatever works for your platform, policies and budgets.
In fact, I wrote a Valentine of sorts to content moderators — and why we should appreciate their work, every day.
I hope you’ll join us: take the pledge, take the Surveys… so that in 2021, we’ll be talking about all the things we did that worked in the last year; and maybe create a new hashtag, like #SaferInternetDecade.
