The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Episode: Considering Trust and Safety's Past, Present, and Future
Date: November 30, 2025
Host: Dean Jackson (for Tech Policy Press)
Guests:

• Prof. Danielle Keats Citron (Law, UVA)
• Prof. Ari Ezra Waldman (Law, Northeastern University)
• Jeff Allen (Chief Research Officer, Integrity Institute)

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the history, evolution, and future direction of the trust and safety field within technology platforms. The discussion traces how an ad hoc, reactive set of roles around user protection, abuse, and content moderation became professionalized units—and asks whether recent trends represent a decline from the so-called "golden age" of trust and safety. Panelists explore the effects of economic incentives, compliance requirements, organizational structures, and political developments shaping this vital domain at the intersection of tech and democracy. They end with reflections on sources of hope and possibilities for reform.

Evolution of Trust and Safety: How Did We Get Here?

Early Years: From Ad Hoc Roles to Formal Structures (1990s to 2014)

• Origins:
  • Internet companies in the 1990s faced new legal and ethical challenges.
  • Early "trust and safety" roles were informal and highly reactionary, often established after a crisis.
• Danielle Citron:

  “I first started writing about cyber stalking in 2007… Twitter was focused on spam impersonation and copyright violations. She's like, I'm seeing a whole lot of abuse… I hear you've written about cyber stalking in a piece called Cyber Civil Rights. I don't know many law professors... Can you help me figure out what I need to say to people in charge to show why... online stalking looks like and is and how harmful it is?” (02:36)

• Examples: Individual internal advocates like Del Harvey at Twitter and outside legal scholars shaped initial policy definitions for abuse, hate speech, etc.
• External Pressures: Policy development was largely internal until leaks (e.g., Facebook's hate speech manual in 2011) and media coverage began to force transparency (09:22).
• Shift to Formalization:
  • Citron, referring to her work with Facebook, Twitter, and others:

    “It's only like in 2014 where we get high profile abuse of high profile people, women in gaming… that force a PR in some sense reckoning and an advertising reckoning… It's not cute to have Toyota ads run against rape threats…” (13:00)

  • Advertising concerns and legal/regulatory threats drove companies to dedicate more resources, publish detailed community guidelines, and formalize moderation processes circa 2014.

The "Golden Age" and Its Limits (2015–2020)

• Professionalization:
  • Growth of specialized teams, more robust policies, and internal advocacy.
• Jeff Allen, on internal advocacy:

  “Usually what's happening is that there are people internally that care about a particular issue, and they can't get attention within the company until something external happens. And then once the external thing happens is when the company actually takes movements on it.” (14:58)

• External Events Accelerate Change:
  • Arab Spring, ISIS on social media, Cambridge Analytica, Russian election interference—led to a sense of urgency and investment.
  • “There was kind of a beautiful moment inside of Facebook... we're going to take this really seriously. Every product team, you're all going to spin up your own integrity, you know, versions of it… And yeah, it was great. I think it was great for a while...” (18:00)
• Notable figures (e.g., Del Harvey, Vijaya Gadde, Antigone Davis, Dave Wilner) played key roles as internal champions.

Recent Developments: The Waning of Trust and Safety? (2021–2025)

Economics, Layoffs, and Organizational Downsizing

• The Turn:
  • Post-2020, mass tech layoffs have disproportionately impacted trust and safety, user research, and partnership teams.
  • Dean Jackson:

    “The message seems clear that for companies at least, trust and safety is viewed as more of a cost center than an investment...” (24:02)

• Ari Ezra Waldman (on economics vs. organizational structures):

  “To suggest, as many other scholars and commentators have suggested, that … trust and safety is changing ... simply a matter of it's a cost center and now there isn't a lot of money is insufficient. It's part of the story, but it's incomplete...” (25:32)

• Impact on User Experience:
  • Jeff Allen:

    “User researchers were the primary role for people that were talking to users, doing surveys, doing focus groups... those are kind of the teams that got hit particularly hard in the layoffs, which means that we're seeing the companies are no longer interested in being proactive and asking…the user…” (31:25–33:07)

Compliance Culture and Proceduralism

• Shift from Holistic to Procedural Compliance:
  • Regulatory frameworks (esp. in the EU) have led to a “check-the-box” approach.
  • Dean Jackson:

    “Why is compliance the ceiling for corporate responsibility instead of a floor?” (38:13)

• Ari Ezra Waldman:

  “Compliance culture … is not always about doing the least. It’s about how companies translate external… legal requirements into internal practices… at each point it’s like a game of telephone…” (38:37)

• Danielle Citron:

  “That becomes qualitatively different… once we’re in this, like, stripped down ... huge firings right across all these platforms.” (46:22)

Political Pressures

• Role of U.S. and Global Political Actors:
  • Post-2016, platforms faced political demands from both left and right, domestically and abroad.
  • Ari Waldman:

    "Trump is not an aberration from the Republican Party. He is the apotheosis of where they have been going...Musk is not an aberration of tech CEOs. He is the apotheosis..." (52:57)

  • Jeff Allen:

    “…if you look at it from the global lens, this has been happening all along… India, not too long ago was threatening to arrest all the Facebook employees that were based in India… President Erdogan [Turkey] threatened to turn off all the platforms if they didn't remove his political opponents. Twitter X complied with that. And … the sad irony is that Twitter and X had just laid off all the employees that would have helped him navigate that situation…” (56:30)

Key Takeaways: Critical Insights and Tensions

1. Internal Advocacy vs. External Events

• Change frequently comes from a small number of inside advocates, but their ability to enact reforms depends on external pressure.

2. Economics, Organizational Structures, and Compliance

• Trust and safety is caught between conflicting demands: cost concerns, internal structures, and external regulations.
• The compliance turn risks reducing trust and safety to bureaucratic box-checking.

3. Political Forces Are Ever-Present

• Political narratives and pressures—whether from governments, civil society, or the market—have consistently shaped the scope and direction of trust and safety.

4. Hope, Resilience, and the Way Forward

• Downsized trust and safety professionals are bringing expertise into civil society and regulatory bodies.
• Potential for labor organizing and coalition-building for trust and safety workers to increase their leverage.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Danielle Citron:

  "I always like to think they did it for the goodness of their heart… But I think in truth… it was market pressures… Jennifer Lawrence… writing in Vanity Fair, the posting of my nude photo is a sex crime… I think it's then we had a reckoning of professionalization." (13:00)

• Jeff Allen:

  “It feels very reactionary from the outside. And it’s easy, I think, to be kind of cynical from the outside… but there is some foresight that goes into it and there are people that are proactively thinking about it…” (14:58)
  “The world is much better off when you have people who care about these things working on the inside of the platform… the alternative is nobody who cares… and that’s the worst outcome for everybody.” (56:30)

• Ari Ezra Waldman:

  “It is a tool of people in power to allow sub departments to set up whatever kind of teams they want to make them feel like they have a voice, but then to disempower them, to make sure that voice never… results in any success or any final determination that affects the business.” (27:16)

• Danielle Citron:

  “It is, it's like that combination of economics and structures and well, if this is going to cost too much, we're getting rid of that structure.” (35:19)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:36–09:22] Early years: From ad hoc problem-solving to policy formalization
• [13:00–14:07] Gamergate, The Fappening, Advertiser pressures drive reckoning
• [14:58–20:51] The internal/external interplay; User advocacy inside companies
• [24:02–29:32] Economics vs. organizational structure vs. compliance
• [31:25–33:07] Impact of layoffs on user research and trust & safety
• [38:13–48:55] Rise of compliance culture and its limits
• [50:42–56:30] Political forces, responses, and hope for the future

Reasons for Pessimism—And Optimism

• Pessimism:

  • Trust and safety functions are increasingly siloed, downsized, and proceduralized.
  • Internal advocates struggle for influence as companies default to minimal, compliance-driven actions.

• Reasons for Hope:

  • Laid off professionals are building capacity in civil society and government, potentially increasing expertise in regulatory settings (56:30).
  • Surveys show that industry insiders often want more, not less, platform regulation.
  • Support for labor organizing and mutual aid among trust and safety workers.

Final Thought

Jeff Allen:

"...if you do want a little bit of silver lining... we're kind of seeing a pipeline being built between having that big tech experience towards regulating the industry itself… If you want one little reason to be optimistic … 84% of our members said, yes, we would like to see more regulation of social media.” (57:11)

Summary prepared for The Tech Policy Press Podcast episode, "Considering Trust and Safety's Past, Present, and Future."