On October 27th, 2021, our #TSCollective Community Manager, Matt Soeth, sat down with Spectrum Lab's advisor, and co-founder of the Fair Play Alliance, Kimberly Voll, Head of Trust & Safety at IRL - Do More Together, Rey Allie; and Jeff Hanlon, Sr. Director, Customer Care & Education, Together Labs.
Be champions for trust and safety at your company. You need to live, breath and execute these values every day. As much as possible, trust and safety should be injected into the process of development and creation. This way, you can make sure those values are part of the growth and development in your platform and you can define and advocate saying, “this is what good looks like.”
Here are the key takeaways:
Strategy is Key!
- Grow responsibly, from the beginning
- Put it in the pitch deck, make your values known and share then with everyone
- We need execs at top to really care about trust and safety. Give them the language they need to support and advocate for that.
- Get engineering the tools to build in guardrails
- More metrics: Look at the data from different angles
- Signals for increase vulnerability
- Degrees of engagement
- Humans, engaging socially
- User retention and conversion vs losing members
- Rate of reporting as a measure of community health
- Do you users know how to use the reporting tools?
- Have clear messaging when communicating with your users that a violation has occurred and how they broke community guidelines.
Kim Voll joined an amazing team at Riot. When she arrived, she asked herself some tough questions and laid out a few priorities for success.
- How do we make trust and safety a company priority? There should be a wholistic company wide strategy and we need to be intentional about our efforts
- We need to operationalize the values - fold them throughout the organization so they are part of our product and development decisions
- Ask the question: what are your values, understand what you stand for and what you don’t
- Communicate in an actionable way that is compatible with your business model
- Educate teams on how trust & safety will benefit their work - we don't’ have infinite times and resources, so we need to be compassionate to others goals
Jeff Hanlon leads a wide range of trust and safety groups across several different experiences at Together Labs.
- Developing an app for a younger audience got us thinking about how we interact with our current audience. Safety, privacy, and reporting tools matter, and we started to see how we could make them better and create a better experience for ALL users.
- Values across our platforms are the same no matter what. Experiences may be different, but values are not.
- Toxicity exists everywhere, we are guiding the experience, providing guardrails and will do our best to empower users and provide the tools they need for a positive experience.
Rey Allie has worked across trust and safety in different roles. He recently joined IRL as their Head of Trust and Safety.
- Trust and safety started as the removal of content to comply with regional law - bad stuff was clearly the illegal stuff
- Then we started seeing gray area content and we asked ourselves, does this align with our principles and values? This led to moderation and policy teams as platforms aligning with the values of the external world vs the values of the platform.
- In the third iteration, it wasn't just about the content, but it was also about the features the platform itself builds
- Users want more control over their experience, this gives them agency
- Platforms started thinking about features and AI - how do we build the algorithm? Is our method ethical?
- Real world situations, and how how those situations show up on platforms (elections, etc) will impact users. Working with outside experts can help mitigate, and hopefully, identify that impact to users.
- The good news, it’s becoming more of a horizontal alignment vs vertical alignment with a wide range of experience and focus across teams.
Looking for more?
Our master class is available to watch online. We recorded this session for you to revisit with your teams and absorb all the great information that was shared.
In addition, you can check out our #TSCollective, a community of trust and safety professionals sharing best practices and support for this heroic work.
