“TSPA advances the trust and safety profession through a shared community of practice.”
Mission
The Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA) is a 501(c)(6) non-partisan membership association that supports the global community of professionals who develop and enforce principles and policies that define acceptable behavior and content online.
The work of trust and safety professionals is critical to the health and safety of the internet and society at large. It is often challenging and difficult work as they address some of the most pressing and hardest multidisciplinary issues in online trust and safety. As a membership association, we bring together professionals in this field and provide professional development, networking opportunities, and educational resources.
The work of trust & safety
As internet communities and online services have grown, they’ve needed to figure out what online behavior is fair game, and what’s not. Teams that have been formed to handle this responsibility often fall under the rubric of “trust and safety.” While content policy and moderation are a big part of trust and safety, and the areas that get the most public attention, trust and safety also includes the people who tackle financial risk and fraud, those who process law enforcement requests, engineers who work on automating product policies, and more. Today, this growing class of professionals is a diverse group. They work for large online services, small startups, and as volunteers; they practice on every continent, from Silicon Valley to Sydney, from Dublin to Dhaka, from Singapore to São Paolo.
Their jobs are critically important — and difficult. They roll up their sleeves and wrestle with thorny issues of online trust and safety, day in and day out. The challenges they face are enormous: balancing nuanced considerations on complex policy issues; navigating problems like election interference, extremism, and harassment; and tackling spam, account takeovers, and fraud. These issues are front and center during these fraught times, as trust and safety professionals aim to combat a myriad of online abuse related to systemic racism, police violence, and COVID-19 — such as hate speech, misinformation, price gouging, and phishing — while keeping a safe space for connecting people with vital, authoritative information, and with each other. Online trust and safety is critical to healthy societal interactions, and it’s imperative to support the professionals who are doing this important work.
TSPA was founded in the wake of the 2018 Content Moderation at Scale (COMO) conference in Santa Clara, which was convened by one of TSPA’s founders and board members, Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman. During this conference, it was clear that there was a need for more community amongst people who do trust and safety work.
Who is a trust and safety professional?
Globally, more than 100,000 trust and safety professionals do critically important and challenging work under intense scrutiny. Trust and safety evolves constantly and manifests in different ways and contexts around the world. This work may include, but is not limited to, the following:
- Content review and moderation
- Policy enforcement
- Safety incident management
- Product policy development
- Trust and safety tool building
- Trust and safety analytics
- Legal compliance
- Trust and safety focused ML/AI
Trust & Safety Foundation
The Trust & Safety Foundation (TSF) is a sibling organization of TSPA. Understanding trust and safety operations and practices are essential in developing technology platforms, research, education, and regulations that have a positive impact on internet platform users. TSF works to improve society’s understanding of the trust and safety field through educational and research programs and interdisciplinary dialogue.
