Trust & Safety Coffee Hours

Aaron Berman is a technology policy and national security leader focused on making online spaces safe and secure. He has held a series of senior roles first at the Central Intelligence Agency and now Meta, including more than 10 years leading large teams. His substantive expertise is in mis- and disinformation, cyber threats, counter extremism, and the Middle East and South Asia. He has a Masters in Public Policy from Georgetown and BA from Williams College in computer science and music. He’s based in Seattle.

As Pinterest’s former Head of Policy, Adelin led the team that developed the company’s principles and core values around content moderation, covering a range of issues from hateful speech to medical (mis)information to dank memes. Prior to Pinterest, she ran Twitter’s Legal Ads Policy team, guiding policy and operations for Twitter’s self-serve and international advertising products.

As the Lead Software Engineer on the Growth and Trust & Safety team at Yik Yak, Adrian was able to help scale Yik Yak to 1 million DAU’s, build internal trust & safety infrastructure, and close a seed round of $6 million dollars. With his background in engineering, he has had the pleasure of working alongside the brightest minds in the industry throughout his career and has found his passion for building a better internet from his time at Yik Yak to his current role at Red Hat.

With a PhD in Communication, and as a trust & safety professional with over a decade of experience in industry and academic research, Alex has led and conducted product, policy, and strategic research on key societal harm topics like misinformation, polarization, content quality, and crisis response. Alex is an expert on social and informational needs in online communication platforms and emergent technologies, and their research spans both qualitative (interview & ethnography) and quantitative (surveys, experiments, & computational social science) methodologies.

Alice Hunsberger is VP of Customer Experience at Grindr, where she specializes in creating a human-centered user experience through policy development, cross-functional collaboration, and sensitivity to a diverse and global user-base. She heads up the global CX team which includes customer support, customer experience and user insights, content moderation, and trust and safety. Alice is also the key stakeholder for policy development and trust and safety product initiatives at Grindr, where T&S is seen as a strategic asset. Alice has over 12 years experience leading Customer Support, Customer Experience and Trust & Safety teams in the dating app industry. Prior to joining Grindr, she led the CX team at OkCupid, where she built the team from the ground up. She got her start in T&S 20 years ago when she founded an internet forum, quickly learning that moderation and policy is critical for creating inclusive community spaces. She is passionate about ethical tech policy, believing that dating apps, and indeed the whole internet, should be welcoming, equitable, and inclusive for everyone.

Alicia recently joined Twitch, a livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, as the Senior Director for Content Policy and Policy Outreach. Prior to coming to Twitch she worked at YouTube and Google in the Product/Compliance and Public Policy teams for four years. In her time at YouTube she helped create resources to support families like the YouTube parental supervised experience and Best Practices for family creators as well as launching compliance programs for new laws like the Age-Appropriate Design Code. While she has worked in industry T&S for a little over four years her career has spanned almost 20 years of work to support youth and caregivers on and offline. Before working in the tech industry she was an academic and media literacy educator, and co-authored the book Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears About Technology Shape Children’s Lives. She has appeared in press including NPR, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and more.

Bethany started her tech policy career as a Fellow on the Twitter Public Policy team. While there, she discovered her love for Trust and Safety and was hired as a Site Policy Specialist. After almost three years, she joined Pinterest’s Content Policy team as a Content Policy Manager and then Senior Manager. She’s currently a Content Policy Manager at Niantic, the company that created PokémonGo. She is located in New York City EST.

TSPA Members Only

Brian’s mission is to help educate others in how to gain trust and better understand your customers. He’s a Trust & Safety leader specializing in building scalable teams and programs from scratch. Brian’s career has been built by simplifying complex ideas and incessantly asking, “Why?”. Currently, he’s the Head of Trust & Safety at Dodgeball where he is an internal advocate and educator for the Trust & Safety community.

Cathryn Weems is the T&S Coffee Hours program mentor. She’s been working in Trust & Safety for over 20 years – before it was even called Trust & Safety! Originally from the UK, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area over 20 years ago when working at Yahoo! but has worked at a variety of other tech companies (Flickr, YouTube/Google, Dropbox, and Twitter) throughout her career. She has experience in child safety, people management, operations, and policy development, but most recently has specialized in leadership, global content regulation, and legal requests from law enforcement/government or rights holders. Her most recent role is Senior Director, Legal Policy at Twitter where she leads a global team of more than 125 people, along with two vendors, handling a variety of legal requests and regulatory compliance matters sent to the company. She is passionate about promoting TSPA (& T&S as an industry in general), as well as connecting people across the industry and is looking forward to chats! 

TSPA Members Only

Christopher manages the Content Moderation Ops team for Mercari, a peer to peer e-commerce marketplace. In his time in the T&S space, he would consider his major areas of expertise to be vendor management/alignment, people management, and working to organize knowledge. Before his current role, Christoper worked in enhanced due diligence for a bank, then was working in the BSA/AML space for Mercari for about a year, so he’s am happy to discuss the differences and relationships between BSA compliance work and Trust and Safety/Content Mod. Christopher has also performed enhanced due diligence work on high risk customers, and worked on numerous money laundering and consumer protection related engagements. Christopher is currently located in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Mountain Time, USA) and working remotely so he’s happy to commiserate about working way outside a tech hub, but is afraid he won’t be able to offer too many solutions. He has two school-age kids and has been in his current role for about four years. He looks forward to chatting with folks!

Based in Dublin, Daniel is a Project Manager focussing on harmful content at Meta for more than four years. Working with a variety of cross-functional teams, Daniel’s main areas of expertise include improving media detection and machine learning processes for many T&S problems. Influencing technical teams and product goals and supporting new hires in T&S are some of the key skills Daniel has. Daniel holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Psychology from University College Cork (UCC). All from the Technological University Dublin (TUD) he also hold: a Masters Degree in Public Relations, a PostGrad Certificate in Data Science and a Masters of Science in Computer Science. Before Meta, Daniel worked in the youth-focussed NGO sector in campaigns and comms for four years.

TSPA Members Only