Last week, I had the privilege of attending #TrustCon, put on by the incredible team at the Trust & Safety Professional Association. I learned from so many, and I'm grateful for the engaging, challenging, and enlightening conversations I had. My career has been dedicated to the prevention of violence, and one question Ravi Iyer asks is, "What about upstream design?" To which I respond: In the world of Social Work, we call this Primary Prevention. The good thing is, no need to recreate new wheels for how to address Public Health concerns and the harm that is perpetuated and experienced within the T&S space. A lot of the conversations I heard were also about how we "bridge the gap" of Theory and Practice, but this is a concept that many professions have done for a long time, social workers included. Similarly to what others have shared, in order to engage in Primary Prevention efforts, we have to challenge social constructs, and much of my focus in my career has been on education and combatting systems of oppression in order to actually prevent harm- which can be done in upstream design. I love chatting all things prevention, and in a reactive environment like T&S I'm excited to see the work we do towards prevention of harm - our impact could be huge! This is a Public Health resource but still a little primer on Primary Prevention, Secondary, and Tertiary prevention: https://lnkd.in/eNBd66h3
Managing Director of the USC Marshall School's Neely Center | Improving Tech's Impact on Society
TrustCon Should Focus on More Upstream Design #Trustcon was a great event and the organizers should be really proud of themselves. It was a rich conversation across policy makers, technologists who really cared, and civil society groups. I met many an old friend and look forward to keeping in touch with many new friends. However, I did find myself having the same conversation over and over again about the importance of upstream design. The conversations about design that I saw were often about how to design reporting flows or designing moderation systems rather than how one might design a system to prevent harm in the first place. Many conversations didn't include design at all. For example, a conversation about sextortion didn't really touch on why it is relatively easy for many groups to contact youth online and see their contact lists when many teens do not believe public accounts are beneficial. Instead, the discussion focused on educating youth to recognize sextortion and report it. That is noble work, but clearly it would be better to prevent the need to report it in the first place, right? I'm happy to be corrected if folks had other experiences as I certainly didn't get to see everything. Maybe I was in the wrong places. But I do worry that there is now a whole industry (e.g. the many vendors selling moderation based services) that has a vested interest in the content moderation paradigm. This is noble work too, but it is *not* the most effective lever in preventing harm and so I think it is worth intentionally making even more space for rethinking how our online spaces are designed. Thoughts and opinions welcome.
Director of Programming and Partnerships at Darkness to Light; Board President Attachment and Trauma Network; 2021 Darkness to Light Instructor of the Year, Proud Kappa Delta ('95 Sigma Pi), TSPA Member
3moYou tell them Katie May ! Glad to have you in the space sharing the message.