TrustCon is always a pleasure for TSPA to host and an honor to bring together the brightest in the trust and safety field. This year, more than 1,350 attendees joined us from nearly 450 companies, representing 34 countries convened for the 5th TrustCon. The sessions, hallways, birds of feather, exhibit hall, lunch tables buzzed with thought-provoking discussions, passionate discussions on how to solve difficult problems, and the joy in seeing old friends and meeting new ones. TrustCon 2026 was one of our best yet.
While the sessions were filled to capacity discussing topics ranging from AI to research, from engineering to child safety, from sustainability to regulations, and so much more, the morning plenaries laid the foundation for the event. Attendees left San Francisco reinvigorated and downright enthusiastic to tackle the growing, unique challenges facing their companies.
Connections to the Past
TrustCon turned five this year, and our Executive Director, Charlotte Willner, opened the conference by asking a room of 1,300+ trust and safety professionals a simple question: what did you want to be when you grew up? “None of us specifically prepared for a job in trust and safety.” Charlotte referenced her own path where she was she a part of a scrappy six-person team at Facebook in 2010 to now leading TSPA, which not only hosts the largest trust and safety conference, also has a growing membership, crowdsourced a curriculum on trust and safety that is available to anyone, and is currently conducting its second global trust and safety compensation survey (survey now open until September 20, 2026), among a wide range of trust and safety programming (see T&S Resources tab on our website).
Charlotte drew parallels between personal professional development – who we wanted to be and who we grew up to be – and the growth of the trust and safety field. For trust and safety, said Charlotte, growing up means becoming known, and with visibility comes scrutiny, including commentators declaring trust and safety’s best days are behind us, investors cheering every round of layoffs, and T&S practitioners in a tug-of-war of government policy.
After noting their political differences, Charlotte closed her opening keynote with the line that gave this recap its name, borrowed from the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s reflection on searching for the mythical “they” who really run things: “There is no they, there is only we.” It set the tone for three days built on that same idea, that nobody is coming to save this work but the people already doing it, together.
Daphne Keller, Director of Platform Regulation at Stanford Law School, made the case that trust and safety practitioners already hold more authority than they realize. She hailed trust and safety workers as heroes on three fronts: to the companies that depend on them to keep chaos at bay, to the individual users whose worst days they sit with, to resisting government overreach from both parties. “You are building out the muscle memory that protects us all,” she told the room of both seasoned and new professionals.
Real-time Solutions for the Present
On the second day, Colton Pond, Socure CMO at Socure, grounded Daphe’s remarks in reflecting on the role of trust and safety today and the ever changing technology landscape. “There is no time in which the industry is changing more than today, and AI is catapulting that change in both positive and negative ways,” said Colton. Colton continues to explain how fraud is expanding, bad guys are collaborating, and AI is accelerating fraud attacks of every kind; however, bringing trust & safety professionals together, similar to glassmakers exiled to Murano Island in the late 1200’s, will drive innovation and progress. “This close proximity with one another in a certain field drives greater collaboration and innovation, [and] is what we see in trust and safety professionals fighting fraud and managing risk,” Colton concludes.
Colton maintains a firm conviction that the bedrock of this entire profession remains trust and safety. “You care about the safety of your platforms. You care about the trust and authenticity of your platform. You care about the safety of the users on your platform. And this is key to making sure that [the field] continues to move forward in the right way.”
Looking Towards the Future
Day three of TrustCon kicked off with a panel of trust and safety veterans, including Tom Thorley (GitHub), Harsha Bhatlapenumarthy (Meta), and Yoel Roth (Match Group), moderated by TSPA Board Member, Dona Bellow (Reddit), providing insights for the next generation of trust and safety professionals. Panelists traced their own paths into the community, giving advice to newcomers that doubles as a mission statement for the field’s next chapter: don’t chase the trendy problem, build durable expertise, and remember that seniority isn’t authority.
The panel also pushed back on the idea that trust and safety practitioners ought to speak and act in one monolithic way. “You don’t owe anyone your martyrdom,” Yoel said, responding to a journalist’s critique that trust and safety workers had become complacent. “There is no wrong theory of change. It’s your personal approach to it. […] Recognize that the journey of driving change is going to look very different for each of us.” During the panel discussion, Harsha reminded the audience that TSPA’s crowd-sourced Trust & Safety Curriculum was written by more than 40 volunteer professionals, because not one person should presume to speak for trust and safety alone and reflects the presumption that trust and safety is a collective of individuals’ knowledge and experiences.
Trust and safety is ever evolving and changing, and trust and safety practitioners are at the center. Yes, trust and safety is facing increasing scrutiny because that’s part of growth. However, as reminded by our keynotes this year, trust and safety professionals keep the chaos at bay. We are the bedrock of platform safety, trust, and user safety. We are not a monolith, but a collective. Despite the challenges, constraints, critiques, and external factors that make this job harder than ever, there is only one answer, and that is us. TrustCon is our Murano Island.
