Highlights from TrustCon 2024: Elevating Trust and Safety

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining the ActiveFence team for my third TrustCon. Like the two before it, TC2024 was truly outstanding—bringing together industry leaders and professionals from around the world to discuss everything related to enhancing trust and safety practices across online communities and platforms. 

A highlight of the event was the opportunity to meet with top T&S leaders and chat with them about their journey navigating the T&S field in 2024 and their visions for our industry’s future. Here’s what they had to say:

Now that we’ve had the chance to rest and collect our thoughts, we’re excited to share what we learned last week. 

Here’s what we found particularly interesting: 

Operational KPIs & Metrics Take Center Stage

Change is in the air. One of the most noticeable shifts this year was trust and safety teams’ newfound focus on operational metrics, efficiency, and becoming a business partner. Over half (82) of the sessions included themes related to metrics, operations, team building, and scale. 

This echoes many sentiments we have heard at client meetings over the past year: trust and safety teams are seeking ways to improve efficiency, prove their value, and make a lasting business impact. Our partners are busy identifying the right metrics to track—both aimed at boosting efficiency and those that prove moderation drives business impact. This is a testament to Trust and Safety’s core mission: improving the user experience by creating safe and trusted environments.

Two of the most popular sessions focused exactly on these topics. One – Moderate your Workflow looked at ways to improve efficiency, focusing on budget and resource optimization throughout the moderation process. The other – From Costs to Gains dug deep into the quantifiable metrics that demonstrate the positive impact of trust and safety on business success. In this session, we learned about the long-term impact of safety investments, and how those can be used to inform strategic decisions about trust and safety investments. 

These complimentary sessions promoted the importance of measurement and the impact of trust and safety on business outcomes.

The Year of GenAI

Generative AI was the topic of the hour. Seemingly every other session dealt with GenAI at some level—whether as a core challenge to trust and safety, or as a magic moderation tool.

The double-edged sword that is GenAI is a recurring trend we’ve been hearing from many of our clients. While enabling mass content creation (both harmful and benign), GenAI systems can be biased, and with a bit of coaxing, may produce harmful content. But GenAI can also be a massively powerful tool that can streamline moderation decisions and significantly improve automated content detection. The possibilities are endless, and the industry is just now exploring how to wield this powerful tool to our advantage.

In one session, panelists discussed how GenAI would improve moderation by enabling policy managers to quickly create and update policy, analyze multiple signals to reach a smarter moderation decision and create learning sets for improved automated detection. To ensure that GenAI’s positive impact outweighs the potential risks, we learned that collaboration between platforms, vendors, governments, and civil society is vital.

Overcoming Unknown Unknowns

While GenAI and metrics were on everyone’s minds, another key theme was the importance of uncovering unknown unknowns and staying ahead of threats through proactive research. 

Some sessions focused on cybercrime and extremism, and quite a few were specifically concerned with elections and disinformation. This is not surprising given the highly volatile, election-packed year we are in right now. Trust and safety is at the forefront of ensuring safe, fair elections, and we take this job seriously.

Another critical area of focus was child safety, aligning with new and existing child online safety regulations, and with teams’ true desire to keep kids safe on platforms. 

A core learning for us was that teams are seeking child safety tools that go beyond or complement established technologies like hash matching. Trust and safety leaders stressed that while hash matching covered a lot of their child safety needs, they lacked the ability to detect novel CSAM and unknown abuses. As we look towards the future of keeping kids safe, especially in the realm of generative AI, the ability to detect CSAM not found in hash databases becomes especially crucial.

Regulation Can be Confusing

2024 is The Year of Compliance as we learned in one session. And while the focus on online safety regulations grew this year, compliance has been top of mind for many trust and safety teams for years. At ActiveFence, we have been talking about the DSA and Online Safety Act for at least the past two years.

Several very popular sessions were dedicated to regulations—centering on the EU’s DSA, the UK’s Online Safety Bill, and various child safety and counter-terrorism regulations. However, we got the sense that while larger, more established teams were ready for practical discussions on how regulations impact business, most smaller teams were not. Teams that recently began navigating compliance are still trying to grasp what these regulations require of them. This is an area where many Trust and Safety teams still need guidance and clarity from regulators and vendors alike.

Finally, Trust and Safety Likes to Party!

At the end of a long day of learning, workshopping, and chatting, everyone, including trust and safety champions loves to unwind—and meeting so many of you at our Birds of a Feather wine tasting happy hour was a real treat. Our conversation tables, centered on policy, generative AI, threat intelligence, and trust and safety tooling enabled free knowledge-sharing and were inspiring to listen to.

Until Next Time

To summarize: TrustCon 2024 was an incredible opportunity to meet, discuss, and learn from one another. Thanks to the TSPA and everyone who attended for a memorable event, where we navigated the ever-shifting currents of trust and safety. 

As Trust and Safety continues to gain recognition as a cornerstone of business success, the discussions and sessions from this year’s event will undoubtedly shape the future of the industry.

See you next year!