Trust and Safety Foundation

We are thrilled to announce that the Global Majority Research Committee (GMRC) is now at quorum!   Meet the GMRC co-chairs and members, who come from academia, civil society, and the industry, bringing diverse perspectives from regions across the Majority World. The main goal of the GMRC is to elevate voices from the Majority World within the field of Trust & Safety by producing research and engaging in academic, industry, and civil society activities and forums. A few of the GMRC members will be at TrustCon next week. If you see them around, please don't hesitate to say hi! They will be happy to further discuss the work the GMRC is doing and their plans for the next few months. Sujata Mukherjee Nadah Feteih Fadzai Madzingira Shubhi Mathur Mona Elswah, Ph.D. Sabhanaz Rashid Diya Juan Felipe R.

Last week I joined researchers and experts in the field of Trust & Safety at the Stanford Law School Trust and Safety Research Conference! My colleagues and partners-in-adventure Camille François, Eli Sugarman, Rama G. Elluru, Dave Willner, and I shared the different ways open source Trust & Safety software supports business goals, fosters innovation and competition, improves the developer experience, and most importantly… contributes to an open and accessible internet. We are at a critical moment where we are finally able to move beyond our traditional harm-specific silos, and collectively build towards flexible and neutral infrastructure that enables pluralism and scaled impact. We're in the early days of a future where classifiers and datasets in Trust & Safety are openly shared across the tech industry, academic researchers, and civil society. In this world, people who are learning to code or experiment with AI for the first time can do so safely and know where to go for resources if they run into something they don’t know how to handle. This future of open and transparent tooling helps policy makers better understand the complicated systems and workflows that enable platforms to keep people safe and comply with legislation and regulation. We’re building this future now and you can be part of it. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably someone we want to talk to! If you work at a tech organization, think about what parts of your system could be open sourced. Also, what open tools does your organization need and would consider beta testing with us? With your help, we will provide the neutral infrastructure and ongoing maintenance to grow Trust & Safety’s open source community. #trustandsafety #opensource #TSRC

Our Social Media Governance Initiative (SMGI) analyzed 20 yeas of online trust and safety research. You can access the complete data set here: https://lnkd.in/eaKmMDZa Michael Bochkur Dratver Matt Katsaros Stanford Internet Observatory

Many, many thanks to all of those who applied to be a part of our second annual Research Collaborative! We've sent out decision notifications and will be sharing the date & time for our public session here in the coming weeks. Stay tuned! We're especially grateful to Toby Shulruff, Charlotte Willner, Renn Henry, PE, Maia Levy Daniel, and Michael R. Swenson for serving on our Program Committee. 🙏 P.S. To learn more about the Collaborative see: https://lnkd.in/gG64Y6bg

We've hosted two roundtables so far this year (about elections and mis/disinformation and language support, content moderation, and tooling) and, after participant review and feedback, we're excited to share reports from both with you! You can find the reports here: https://lnkd.in/dDjnfiru P.S. We have two more scheduled for this year: a follow-up roundtable to our July event and a new invite-only workshop about human rights and trust and safety!

Check out this new T&S Curriculum chapter about privacy from members of our sibling organization the Trust & Safety Professional Association!

Our sibling organization, the Trust & Safety Professional Association, has just posted the agenda for the upcoming APAC Summit, and we're excited to see sessions about region-specific research, partnerships with civil society, and collaborations across stakeholder groups!

Check out this talk by Jen Weedon and Sasha Mathew about the chapter on Safety by Design that they helped author for the Trust & Safety Professional Association T&S Curriculum!

Deconstructing Meaning: A CounterBalance Seminar is a special series of meetings co-hosted by Siegel Family Endowment, organized in collaboration between the Santa Fe Institute, Trust & Safety Professional Association and Google. This series will explore the technical and ethical complexities of content parsing in the age of AI. The first virtual 90-minute session takes place on September 10, 2024 at 9AM (US Mountain Time), discussing the building blocks of content parsing. See more details on the event page here: https://lnkd.in/gRNG3Pi3. Although attendance will be limited, practitioners and scholars with relevant backgrounds can apply using this short form: https://lnkd.in/gxbNfweh.

🚨One month countdown begins for the Trust & Safety Research Conference🚨 The detailed schedule for the Trust & Safety Research Conference is now live! https://lnkd.in/g9pEtdsU Join us on September 26-27 at Stanford University as we bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, civil society, and government to explore the latest developments in the field of trust and safety. 📅 Dates: September 26-27 Register here: https://lnkd.in/gTN3w3Nt