In addition to finding the right external organizations to work with, an important piece of external engagement is finding the right ways of working with those orgs. These engagements are relationships: it is critical that a Trust & Safety team can be open, maintain transparency, be accessible, iterate on feedback, provide privacy or security (if needed), and engage in a way that provides as much value to participating external organizations and individuals as it does to the platform. Trust & Safety teams must be sure to be open and transparent throughout the planning process, checking in to ensure the desired format aligns with an engagement partner’s interest and availability.
Key Factors to Consider
- Input
- Determine what kind of feedback needs to be collected from external stakeholders:Higher-level, strategic advice, or lower-level, specific feedback? For example…
- Advice from subject matter experts to inform development of a new product that will launch later in the year
- Timely and detailed intelligence to inform reactive strategy to an immediate global crisis
- Research into emergent harms for a future technology that may impact specific communities
- Determine what kind of feedback needs to be collected from external stakeholders:Higher-level, strategic advice, or lower-level, specific feedback? For example…
- Output
- Determine what the output needs to be so that it can be actionable for internal Trust & Safety team stakeholders
- To avoid being extractive, determine how will the engagement and output will provide value, trust, and long-term support back to external partners
- Format & Timespan
- Determine whether it will it be targeted feedback from one individual or organization, or collective feedback from many (e.g., in a workshop)
- Determine whether to engage multiple times throughout the course of a year, one-time, or short-term
Next, consider some engagement models or formats which have been successful in the past:
Examples
- Advisory Boards or Advisory Councils: Advisory boards and councils are a broad category that take on many different forms. In some cases, advisory groups are established for a specific, shorter duration where external stakeholders can provide guidance narrowly on new policy that is being considered or a new product under development. Other times, advisory groups are established to provide external partners a regular, ongoing, and persistent opportunity to engage with a given team.
- Announcing the Twitter Trust & Safety Council (Twitter; February 2016)
- Strengthening our Trust and Safety Council (Twitter; December 2019)
- Introducing the Spotify Safety Advisory Council (Spotify; June 2022)
- Driver Safety Council: Doing the work to advocate for delivery partner safety (Grubhub; n.d.)
- Targeted Community Engagement: Targeted community engagement looks towards members of the community—which can include researchers, policymakers, and civil society members, but can further draw from community leaders, local community membership groups, and other social organizations. This type of targeted engagement looks towards individuals in the community who might not engage on these topics as part of their work, but whose knowledge and connections provide an additional important angle to understand key Trust & Safety problems on the ground in various regions.
- How Meta is Preparing for Nigeria’s 2023 General Elections (Meta; February 2023)
- Our Approach to Maintaining a Safe Online Environment in Countries at Risk (Meta; October 2021)
- Facebook Just Met With Reps From Myanmar, The Philippines, And Sri Lanka To Discuss Its Global Misinformation Problem (Meta; September 2018)
- Trusted Partner Escalation Channels: There may be external partners that can provide reliable and actionable reports of safety threats on a platform, particularly from civil society organizations (who sometimes will monitor content on platforms). In these cases, platforms need timely information about potential harm with detailed context & local insight. Escalation channels provided to external experts act as an ongoing, direct line of communication established between a platform and the external partners.
- Bringing local context to our global standards (Meta; January 2023)
- Research Grants: Some platforms provide grants directly to researchers to work on a targeted area of research. Grants can kickstart or expand new research in a Trust & Safety topical area, and grant programs—in some formats—can be useful for academics to maintain independence from the platform on what kind of work may or may not be done.
- 2022 Foundational Integrity Research request for proposals (Meta; 2022)
- Our first Trust & Safety Research Awards grantees (Google; January 2024)
- Research Collaborations & Commissions: Instead of grants, platforms may want to work directly in collaboration with external researchers on a particular study or topic. This form of engagement might mean inviting a researcher (or a team) inside the company and allowing them to perform analyses directly on platform data. It can also follow models where the external research team instead advises an internal team (perhaps due to privacy policies on data access) on how the internal team might design or conduct some analyses.
- Research partnership to understand Facebook and Instagram’s role in the U.S. 2020 election (Meta; August 2020)
- Demystifying teens online interactions (Roblox; September 2021)
- Accessible Datasets: Another way to engage with researchers is to release specific datasets of interest for public access. Though, sometimes, datasets might be limited to a set of qualified researchers. Making datasets available can involve an internal team preparing and anonymizing a particular dataset of interest (for example, activity around a particular event) and making that data available for consumption by approved researchers or analysts.
- Enabling further research of information operations on Twitter (Twitter; October 2018)
- Disclosing state-linked information operations we’ve removed (Twitter; December 2021)
- Twitter Moderation Research Consortium (Twitter; n.d.)
- Trust & Safety Workshops, Conferences, Working Groups & Other Engagements: Cross-industry collaborations that include external experts can also be a form of external engagement. Some platforms have brought together diverse stakeholders to hold workshops or other conversational formats, resulting in public-facing white papers or reports. Platforms might also create a presence at key Trust & Safety events in order to get to know or work with external stakeholders who also attend.
