Careers in Trust & Safety

Keep in mind that T&S includes a wide umbrella of roles and functions that may call for a combination of skill-based expertise (e.g., research, policy development, data analysis) and/or subject matter expertise (fraud, minor safety, election integrity, hate speech, etc.). Think about the intersection of your interests, skills, and transferable experience with the range of T&S opportunities to figure out where you want to focus, as well as the path to get there. Here are some actions you can take to support your journey:

• Learn about the field. Practically speaking, you could look at the community standards for different companies and use the T&S issues mentioned therein as a starting point for online research into the field. For example, if you are interested in hate speech, there are numerous online industry reports and academic publications that could help you learn about the problem, how policy is crafted for it, and how products are designed to combat it. To go deeper, you can also leverage newsletters (e.g., Everything in Moderation, Platformer, Tech Policy Press), podcasts (e.g., Regulate Tech, Tech Policy Podcast), follow subject matter experts on Twitter, set up keyword alerts for technology news outlets (Wired, The Verge, Tech Crunch, etc.), or consult peer-reviewed research publications such as The Journal of Online Trust & Safety.
• Network with current professionals. Within your company, at events, and even on LinkedIn, reach out to people who are doing the work. Request time to chat to learn more about their day-to-day responsibilities, how they got into T&S/their role, and any advice they might be able to offer to support your transition.
• Explore tangential opportunities. If a T&S role at a technology company isn’t immediately within reach, consider applying to fellowships or job opportunities with industry actors that are focused on T&S topics. These could widely range from advocacy nonprofits to trade associations to think tanks to outsourcing companies. On the other hand, if you can access or already have a foot in the door at a company that has a T&S department, look into taking on a role that doesn’t directly live within T&S but often has to deal with T&S-relevant issues (e.g. Community Manager, Content Quality Analyst, Customer Success Specialist). Doing this may offer the opportunity to start taking on tangential tasks or increasingly participate in T&S-relevant projects. 
• Be intentional. Especially if you’re taking on a product-oriented role (Data Scientist, UX Researcher, Product Manager, Product/Content Designer or Engineer), be clear with recruiters about your preferred allocation to a T&S role. If no T&S role is open, consider non-T&S product roles where collaboration with T&S teams is possible and you can develop your expertise through mentoring and shared projects over time.

Aside from career sites and some industry-specific job boards (for example, TSPA, ATIH), you can follow relevant managers or institutes on LinkedIn, or search the careers page of specific companies. Some of these careers pages will have roles divided by internal organizations and may clearly call out “Trust & Safety” as one of them, while others will have T&S roles nested under Legal, Product or Operations to name a few. A keyword search for specific terms (e.g., “safety”, “policy”, “compliance”, “moderation”) will often yield a broader set of results to sort through.

In truth, job titles are not always that meaningful. The skills, roles and responsibilities listed in a job description can be more informative and will give you a better sense of how to apply your transferable experience. For example, you might apply for a user experience research role but the actual work can be a mix of policy, design, market, and systems research. (And if you’re interested in research roles, you can learn more here about types of roles and how to find them!). Similarly, you may find an open position for a threat detection analyst and realize that your background in statistical analysis, intelligence gathering, or cyber-security are directly relevant.

Internships are very valuable, and while not necessary, they can add a lot to your CV/resume when competing for roles against other recent graduates. An internship can teach you about the realities of product or policy development, operations, as well as the risks and opportunities the T&S industry faces.

Different companies and countries have different practices surrounding internships. Larger companies tend to have formalized programs where applications open several months in advance. These are usually announced on their careers page and on social media platforms like LinkedIn.

Some larger companies have started offering T&S-focused internships (TikTok, Roblox, Twitter, etc.) while some others offer the opportunity to join T&S teams through broader internship opportunities (e.g., Google’s BOLD Program) or skill-building programs open to new grads (e.g., Pinterest’s Engineering/Product apprenticeships).  

Smaller companies may create internship positions as funding allows, where additional support is needed for a project, or when approached by a particularly promising applicant. These positions can be announced on career pages or social media, but they can also require proactively reaching out to companies of interest and asking if they have an opening or would be interested in talking about creating one.

There’s also high value in exploring internships with government agencies/regulatory bodies, civil society organizations, local/international think tanks, or research institutes that tackle issues relevant to T&S.

It ranges depending on the function, specialization, and scope, but what’s almost always true is that—unless you’re joining as an engineer—knowing how to code isn’t a skill you need. Similarly, while knowing SQL/Python might be critical to a data analyst or intelligence/investigation role, it’s mostly going to be a nice-to-have, or not relevant in other functions.

That being said, there are some skills and attitudes that are going to be valuable across T&S jobs:

• Project management and prioritization: In a space where there is usually more work than time or people to manage it, being able to identify and focus on delivering impactful projects is critical.
• Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management: T&S principles, decisions and processes serve the business, users and society, which means that they concurrently inform and are informed by a wide range of perspectives and interests.
• Effective communication and relationship-building: The ability to communicate one’s position or asks with nuance and clarity to business partners helps build credibility and trust, which are key when T&S professionals are also often tasked with navigating difficult tradeoffs
• Analytical thinking: The capacity to evaluate how details implicate the larger picture, and reversely, understanding how a system, process, product, policy, trend or environment may impact specific actions.    
• Ability to self-start and search for information: It is not uncommon for T&S professionals to be the first in an organization (or even in industry!) to deal with a new issue, which calls for initiative and curiosity in figuring out how to approach it. This also applies to operating across subject matters which you don’t have expertise in.
• Creativity and adaptability: Technology moves at a fast pace, while bad actors are ever more creative, which means that T&S functions have to constantly adapt and show similar creativity to continue innovating their approach. Constraints in how T&S operates may also come from resource limitations, legal/privacy considerations, or even external trends which make process/method creativity a key to success.
• Humility: Part of the thrill of working in T&S is that there will always be a surprising event/perspective/outcome/consequence you did not expect no matter how thorough your initial input was. It is important to get comfortable with being wrong and approaching situations without ego. It is a space in constant state of evolution, and the most useful attitude is to apply expertise while always being open to learning.
• Resilience: T&S teams deal with complex, heavy topics affecting people and society, which can sometimes disproportionately affect one’s perception of the world or even impact mental well-being, and it is important to learn tactics for self-care.

T&S professionals come from a wide variety of backgrounds (by design and necessity) because this field touches so many issues across society and human/cultural interactions, and the profession has grown to cover a variety of functions with different technical and/or subject matter expertise. In that context, you should think of any degree or certification as a pathway to build expertise or skills that may be leveraged in a T&S role or functions you have interest in.

There’s no widely-recognized T&S certification program, however there are specific areas of specialization with certifications (e.g., privacy, cyber security). Similarly, there are degrees that may lend themselves to be valuable to specific roles, such as Human-Computer Interaction, Social Sciences (e.g., Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology), or Legal specialities.

Some universities are starting to offer courses exploring ethics/safety-related impacts of technology (e.g. Stanford’s Trust and Safety Engineering course), or have degrees that zoom out on broader topics of technology policy (e.g., Cambridge; MIT) or online ethics (e.g., Oxford). However, you may also consider informal education that may be more practical in nature, such as the TSPA Curriculum & Fundamentals, LinkedIn Digital T&S Leader course, or companies’ blogs, policy resources, Safety Centers, transparency reports, etc., where a lot of how they approach their work and challenges they’ve faced is documented.

As a PhD student or early career academic, you’re well positioned to transition to a career in T&S by leveraging the skills you’ve honed in higher education (e.g., communication, research, project management, and collaboration) in addition to any applicable areas of domain expertise (i.e., data analysis, cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, public policy) you may have. In addition to following the general guidance outlined in these FAQs, you’ll also want to:

• Learn about, acknowledge, and celebrate the differences. 
  • In academia, your degrees and publications are your currency, and the work moves at a glacial pace. In tech, the way you leverage your skills and experiences to build and/or improve a digital product or service is your currency, and the work moves at a rapid pace. Learn more about these differences by talking to people who currently work in roles you’d like to pursue. Adjust your expectations by shifting to a business mindset.
  • Embrace systematic decision-making, and learn how to make clear, actionable recommendations. Even if you don’t intend to pursue a research role in T&S, you’ll need to clearly articulate the reasons why you’re advocating for a given solution–and, most importantly, how feasible that solution is in light of organizational goals and constraints.
  • Let go of your academic identity. Academics have a great deal of autonomy and often choose the focus of their work. This isn’t always the case in industry. You’ll need to let go of your academic ego (in the Jungian sense!) and tease out who you are apart from your intellectual contributions. This can take time, so be patient with yourself. And focus on the benefits: better work life balance, better pay, the opportunity to directly impact a product or service, and the freedom to exercise other parts of who you are.
• Do the translation work. Depending on your discipline, being the first author of a peer-reviewed publication likely means you identified the research problem, crafted the research questions, determined scope and budget, conducted a literature review, collected and analyzed data, collaborated with co-authors, wrote parts of the paper, and engaged in a significant amount of project management. But most people who have not come from academia will not glean this from your CV. You’ll need to translate your academic skills and achievements so that you’re legible beyond academia. (The term “impact” means something very different in industry, for example.) Open Post Academics offers some great free resources, including a chapter dedicated to Translating Academic Skills.
• Think beyond research. Academics are naturally suited for research roles, however, it’s important to think beyond research when considering a transition to T&S. For example, you may want to consider policy work, data analytics, training, partner development, or program management, depending on your experiences and areas of expertise. (Review the T&S Curriculum’s Key Functions and Roles list to learn more about potential paths.) If you do apply for research roles (i.e., UX researcher), be sure you know your research methods (and their tradeoffs) backwards and forwards because this will be the expertise that, as a former academic, you’ll bring to your new team.
• Reach out to those who have taken a similar path. There’s a growing community of “alt” or “post acs”—many of whom have transitioned to industry and to T&S specifically. Find your community. You can join relevant LinkedIn groups (for example, EPIC People – Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community), follow conversations on Twitter (#AltAc, #PostAc) and participate in dedicated communities on Slack (e.g., Open Post Academics). You can also join TSPA as an Affiliate member and network with current T&S professionals.

As a first step, you should consult company publications such as blogs, transparency reports, policy briefs, research, as well as consult recent press coverage for any specific company you may be interviewing with (and its competitors) as it relates to T&S-relevant topics.

To stay informed on current landscape shifts, it is advisable to become familiar with regulatory proposals and other local regulations that may be relevant to a market you may expect to work in—as well as professional discussions of these proposals in the media and on social media. 

To develop insight into cross-industry trust & safety perspectives, you could consult reports published by TSPA, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, and other more topic specific organizations (e.g., Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, Institute for Strategic Dialogue).

If you’re interested in working in a product role, consider familiarizing yourself with theories of human behavior that commonly influence the T&S industry including but not limited to  Procedural Justice Theory, Deterrence Theory, and Neutralization Theory.

• If this is your first experience at a tech company—and especially if you’re transitioning from more “traditional” spaces such as government or academia— it may take some time to take in the industry norms, ways of working, how fast things move or get onboard with learning about how platforms or products work, from a technical standpoint. Give yourself the time and grace to acknowledge where you are starting from, ask as many questions as possible, enlist buddies and mentors to guide you, and take a breath—this is how it’s felt for everyone as they get started!
• It can be challenging to accept that, sometimes, even the best T&S efforts cannot “solve” a problem. T&S deals with subjectively-defined concepts, external scrutiny and pressures, and bad actors who continuously seek out weaknesses in any product or policy solution. It is an ever-evolving and iterative journey, where progress is incremental and setbacks happen. Learning how to think adversarially can help you anticipate challenges and help you make informed trade-offs when deciding what solutions to pursue. There are several resources online for training adversarial thinking and for leading so-called “black mirror” ideation sessions  with teams to develop this skill.
• There is rarely a perfect solution, and sometimes just a “less terrible one”. This type of work commonly surfaces ethical questions — e.g., if you can develop a system that removes 95% of adversarial actors from your platform but it also incorrectly removes 2% of your non-abusive user base, is that an acceptable trade-off? How do you compare the harm caused by over-enforcement and the harm caused by not enforcing? This is a tension that T&S professionals have to become comfortable with to do their work responsibly.
• The more successful your work is, the harder it may be to recognize its impact. For example, if your job is to detect and prevent the proliferation of hate online, most people will not have access to the counterfactual and will not know what the experience could have been if you did not do your job. This is a difficult reality of T&S work and can contribute to feeling under-appreciated. This is where having a mission, shared principles, and a focus on specific goals or outcomes can help you and your team remember the value of the work you are doing and how it contributes to protecting people using your products from harm.
• Similar to many other professions where you exclusively deal with societal problems, working in this space can alter your perception of the value and safety of the product you work on, or even of the people who use it. It is important to create time to become familiar with the good stories too, the stories of how your product or team’s efforts have helped people, or good user behaviors to model after, as a means to avoid developing negative tunnel vision.

Similarly to other professional fields, it starts with defining what growth means to you. For example, is it upward mobility? Sharpening your expertise? Developing a new skill? The T&S field has rapidly expanded over the past few years and opened the doors to many different career journeys and access paths that may satisfy your aspirations. A few ideas to consider:

• You could start narrow and broaden over time. The field of T&S is vast—it can be helpful to gain expertise in a specific topic area or functional speciality first, and then expand over time to topics or roles that share similar characteristics, borrowing from your existing experience but broadening your expertise over time. In increasingly becoming more of a generalist, with knowledge in multiple domains, you may become more broadly employable by many different companies.
• Conversely, you could develop a very high level of expertise in a specific area (either as you start or over time) and build yourself to be a renowned expert on that topic. This could mean becoming a “niche” (and potentially rare) expert, with the ability to influence move levels of work on that particular topic (e.g., company policies, public policy engagement, operations) both internally and across the industry.
• You could learn a technical skill (programming, UX design, product management, etc.) and/or join an apprenticeship or rotational program to transition into a product-related role where your T&S expertise is relevant (e.g., Safety Controls PM).
• You could focus on people and strategy, and get on the management track, where you’ll think more broadly about the overall direction of T&S/your team’s efforts, increasingly coordinate priorities with other leaders across the organization, and focus on ensuring that your team is resourced and equipped to carry its work forward.
• Once you’ve built some experience at a larger size company where work tends to be more specialized, you could consider stepping into a higher-level role at a startup or smaller organization to increase your scope of responsibility across many areas.
• You could also take on mentoring responsibilities such as formalizing successful practices into published frameworks that could be discussed and adopted by others in the industry, providing advisory services to peers or trade organizations, or offering consulting services to companies and institutions.