Is anyone left to defend trust and safety?

On LinkedIn Aaron Rodericks related his experience of TrustCon.

He notes:

One political strategist said roughly: “Trust and Safety didn’t just lose the narrative—it stopped telling one.”

I think this is core to the problem Trust and Safety faces now. It tried to be neutral but having a place on the internet where you don't get harassed, mocked, or stalked is--now--inherently political.

Casey Newton notes that the EU's DSA turned the work towards compliance theater, checking boxes. This seems like the antidote. T&S needs to tell a different story about itself, to companies, to users and to itself. An internet where LGBTQIA+ people feel safe, where women don't get harassed, where swatters and Nazis are forced to log off? That's political. That's a story about building the future of the web. That's a story about progress. We're missing that story right now.

As much as we hoped otherwise, the Web is not a separate space, it is intricately tied up in the real world.

“I … can't ignore that so many things are not getting better,” said Willner, who previously built the first safety operations team at Facebook. “So often in past years, perhaps we felt alone in our work — but at least there was some kind of backstop. Surely even if some individual companies or business leaders made questionable choices — like making Grok AI — for kids! — the broader system would still hold. Surely our democratic institutions would prevent the worst imagined outcomes. Surely there were guardrails we could count on. Instead — we've watched norms and institutions we thought were solid prove to be more fragile than we could ever have imagined.”

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