Trust & Safety Coffee Hours

Trust & Safety Coffee Hours are one-on-one conversations designed to provide mentorship to current and aspiring trust and safety professionals. Hosts are volunteering their time and expertise to offer advice to job seekers and T&S professionals. Hosts are not conducting formal interviews, offering referrals, providing product feedback, participating in interviews and/or user research, and/or acting on behalf of their employers or TSPA. If you schedule time and you’re not a current or aspiring T&S professional, a host reserves the right to cancel the appointment without notice.

Here’s how it works:

  • Search for a host based on what you want to talk about. Sign-up using the host’s “Schedule a chat” link.
  • Be respectful of our hosts and their time. Remember the TSPA Code of Conduct applies to all resources, spaces, and programming–even if you’re not a TSPA member.
  • Because these one-on-one conversations are brief, come prepared with questions and have a specific goal in mind. If you’re just getting started in T&S and want to learn more, we recommend reviewing Careers in T&S and the T&S Curriculum before scheduling.

If you’re a TSPA member looking for a way to help other folks on their journey in T&S, sign up to be a T&S Coffee Hours host!

Deniz Atabey Alkan

Deniz Atabey Alkan

she/her
Senior Integrity Operations Manager, Bumble

Deniz currently leads the Integrity Operations team at Bumble, where she is focusing on finding scalable solutions to tackle abusive online behavior and improve Trust & Safety practices. Over the past eight years, she’s worked at Tiktok, Meta and Snapchat to develop an in-depth understanding of how to prevent abusive behavior based on product, process and policy interventions. In her day-to-day, she partners with various cross-functional teams such as Engineering, Data Science, Legal, Policy and local market teams to solve pain points related to ML development/training, review policies/protocols, operational KPIs and sensitive user/regulatory issues. Deniz is based in London.

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Profile photo for Dona Bellow

Dona Bellow

she/her
Content Policy Lead, Reddit

Dona leads Content Policy at Reddit and has served on the TSPA Advisory Board for the past two years. She graduated with a Masters in Internal Law & Human rights many years ago in France, and she’s been working in T&S for about eight years. Dona has worked across the spectrum of legal policy & online operations, community/content policy development, product policy, anti-abuse backend integrations, and responsible innovation programs, at small and very large organizations (incl. a less than 100-people startup, Google, Airbnb, Twitter & Meta). She’s also super passionate about helping people get into T&S and/or navigating their early career in the space. Dona is located in Richmond, CA (PST).

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Profile photo for Elif Dibek

Elif Dibek

she/her
Content Policy Manager, Meta

Elif has been working in the Trust & Safety space for the past ten years. Elif joined Meta’s Content Policy team in 2018 as a people manager, also helping develop content policies specialized in misrepresentation and dangerous organizations and individuals policies. In 2020, Elif co-founded a new policy team that develops and scales policies to address account-level and behavioral abuse. Prior to her move to the policy world, Elif worked on payments compliance on Facebook’s Legal team. She wore many hats on this team including data analysis, KYC/AML/due diligence process design, operations, vendor management, supporting on-site regulatory audits and developing policies to ensure legal compliance. Elif is a certified anti-money laundering & counter-terrorist financing (ACAMS). She is located in Dublin, Ireland.

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Hannah Miller

Hannah Miller

she/her
Senior Policy Manager, AWS

Hannah has worked on policy teams at Pinterest, Twitter, Meta and now AWS! She is an experienced communicator, organizer, and presenter, with a detailed understanding of the trust and safety policy ecosystem. She has experience in collaborating between technology companies and the civil sector, developing policies for content moderation, internet advertising, and creating product policies. Hannah is based in San Francisco in PST.

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Profile photo for Inbal Goldberger

Inbal Goldberger

she/her
VP Trust & Safety, ActiveFence

Inbal is the VP of Trust & Safety at ActiveFence, a Trust & Safety company that enables the biggest Trust & Safety teams to keep their users safe. Inbal had worked eight years as a senior manager in Google Trust & Safety where she managed 50 people and eight teams, ranging enforcement, escalation management, Intelligence and market specialists. Inbal is a proud winner of 2019 & 2020 Google’s “Inspire” award for her management qualities, and has built herself a reputation of a gifted people manager as per her cultivating talent and people-first approach. Before Google Inbal worked in the Cybersecurity field as an R&D manager at Imperva. Inbal comes from a military background, she served nine years as an Intelligence commanding officer in the military, where she took part in the 2003 Iraq war and played a critical role in counter-terrorism missions. Inbal’s experience in Trust & Safety, cybersecurity, intelligence and her many years in leadership roles positions her as a mentor in great demand.

 

TSPA Members Only

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Profile photo for James Freedman Aponte

James Freedman Aponte

he/him
Director Product Marketing, Business Integrity, Meta

James Freedman Aponte is Meta’s Director of Product Marketing for Integrity. In this role, he is focused on building products and policies that deliver safe, high-quality, and trusted experiences for users and businesses across ads, shopping, and messaging on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Prior to joining Meta, James helped build and grow products in various industries throughout his 20+ year career. Most recently, he led Google’s Trust & Safety Strategy and Operations team, where he managed the oversight of the organization’s global priorities. Previously, James co-founded Contratan.do, an online services marketplace in Latin America, and managed several technology and banking products at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. James also spent several years in the aerospace and defense industry as an engineer, designing night vision technologies and communication satellites. With a keen focus on equity and community impact, James has served on the Board of Directors of the Simmons YMCA and the Latin American Chamber of Commerce in Charlotte, North Carolina. He also co-chaired the Hispanic / LatinX Employee Resource Groups at Booz Allen Hamilton and Bank of America, and was named a Young Hispanic Corporate Achiever by the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility.

 

TSPA Members Only

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TSPA logo

Jasmin Aceman

she/her
Project Manager, Meta

Jasmin is a project manager at Meta, where she focuses on hate speech. As a project manager, she works with many cross-functional partners, such as policy, product, data science, and ML engineering. Her main focus is on capacity management and efficiency. A big part of Jasmin’s current role involves influencing a diverse set of stakeholders behind a common goal, improving existing processes or standing up new ones, in order to align with company goals and the overall T&S mission. Her expertise is within stakeholder management, hate speech, data analysis, risk mitigation, and regulations. Jasmin has been located in Dublin (GMT) for the past five years, but she studied in Chicago for her MBA and MS degree in Management Information Systems. She previously worked for Indeed in Austin, Texas, as an International Operations Analyst, with focus on localization efforts of the company’s product offerings. Before starting her career in T&S, she worked for the German market team at Meta, where she focused on risk mitigation and regulations. Besides English, Jasmin also speaks German, French, and Spanish.

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Jonathan Lim

Jonathan Lim

he/him
Head of Investigations APAC, TikTok

Jonathan has over 10 years of T&S and safety-related experience. He is currently the Head of APAC Trust & Safety Investigations at TikTok, where he leads a regional team of analysts to develop actionable intelligence and insights for improving platform safety.

Jonathan was previously at Twitch / Amazon, where he built up a regional law enforcement response team to handle investigations and threat analysis for egregious harms. He was also formerly a police officer in Singapore, and held a range of senior roles in criminal investigations, contingency planning operations, and incident management. He also represented Singapore at the United Nations General Assembly, and also chairs an advisory board for a primary educational institution. He is currently based in Singapore (UTC+8), and is happy to talk about navigating the transition process from government to T&S, learning paths for new T&S practitioners, as well as managing teams.

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Profile photo for Kaitlin Sullivan

Kaitlin Sullivan

she/her
Director of Content Policy, Meta

Kaitlin Sullivan is a Director of Content Policy at Meta, where she leads an international team that develops and scales policies to address account-level and behavioral abuse. She partners with Product and Operations teams to set company strategy for effective, transparent, and principled content moderation. Kaitlin regularly speaks on these issues at universities and conferences, including the Conference on Crimes Against Women, Content Moderation at Scale, and the Internet Governance Forum. Prior to joining Facebook in 2013, Kaitlin worked as a rape crisis advocate and educator at the YWCA of Silicon Valley.

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Kevin Koehler

Kevin Koehler

he/him
Deputy Head of Case Screening and Product Lead, The Oversight Board

Kevin is a Trust & Safety pro with more than nine years of experience in the field, having worn many different hats, working on everything from moderation calls and operations planning, to policy writing and algorithmic detection, to legal process and government response. He is currently the Deputy Head of Case Screening and Product Lead at the Oversight Board Administration. His team supports a committee of Board Members who decide which cases the Board of global experts will review, choosing from among 1 million+ submitted annually by users appealing Facebook & Instagram’s content moderation decisions. He is also a product manager for internal tooling. Previously he was a longtime member of the Trust & Safety team at Automattic, working from startup mode to mature company on platforms such as WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr and others. Kevin is always happy to help on any subject, but some of his favorites are growing a T&S career, starting from non-tech backgrounds, tough choices on how we impact the world, and staying resilient. He travels constantly though you’ll typically find him available to chat on London or East Coast USA hours.

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Laura DeBenedetto

Laura DeBenedetto

she/her
Policy Manager, Airbnb

Laura is passionate about solving safety issues across platforms using clear, consistent policies. She began her work in Trust and Safety on an operational team focusing on hate speech and graphic violence at Meta and worked closely with product and policy teams to ensure they could enforce against these abuses efficiently while maintaining a nuanced approach. Laura also worked on enterprise policies before moving to YouTube to focus on violent extremism. After that she pivoted to behavioral policy writing at TikTok. Now at Airbnb, Laura focuses on safety policies more broadly with an emphasis on violent extremism and child safety. While she is able to draw on her content policy experience from other companies, she also spends a lot of time thinking about the unique real-world element to Airbnb, so she has started to draw upon best practices from law and human rights even more during her time here. Laura is super excited to discuss safety policies, career development, and best practices for inter-company collaboration on sensitive policy issues.

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Profile photo for Laura Dunne

Laura Dunne

she/her
Head of Music and Gated Content Policy, Spotify

Based in Dublin, Laura has 11+ years of experience in global content policy development & enforcement, with particular skills in working with UGC. She started in content moderation at Youtube and has worked in T&S policy at SoundCloud (5 years), Twitter (4.5 years), and now at Spotify, where she heads up policy development for music and gated content. Laura has expertise across a wide variety of safety issues (notably harm, privacy & freedom of expression) and has experience working in: strategic policy development, content moderation, public policy & advocacy, legal requests, crisis comms, incident management, policy comms, automation, and transparency reporting.

 

TSPA Members Only

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