Examining Moral Injury in the Trust and Safety Profession

Trust and safety teams inside tech companies often attract ethically-motivated individuals, those sustained by a sense of purpose in service to protecting others. Similarly, professionals in law enforcement or military work often report feeling motivated by a sense of duty.

Veterans and members of the military intelligence community have a major presence on trust and safety teams. The austerity of the working conditions at tech companies and in the military differ greatly. However, the symptoms such as job grief and burnout are comparable for both trust and safety employees and those in the military.

Thus, recent research into job resiliency among military veterans can teach us lessons about the kinds of distress experienced by those working specifically in trust, safety and policy roles at tech companies.

Crucially, the depression, grief and burnout are likely signals of a deeper rupture, not the rupture itself.

Moral injury is commonly understood as the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values or ethical codes of conduct. Moral injury is a commonly undiagnosed affliction that often manifests as feelings of job grief and resentment.

Beyond feelings of frustration with a job, prolonged not addressable infuriation along with feelings of isolation and despair are commonly felt along with irreconcilable depression and conflicting feelings of pride and shame in one’s work.

These emotions often arise from being commended or promoted for doing a good job in one's role, especially in high-stakes circumstances, while simultaneously confronting how one's actions or choice of inaction doesn’t fully align with what they know to be good for humanity or conflicts with their moral sensibilities.

This type of burnout related to moral injury is important to recognize because it is damaging in ways that result in signs of trauma and the kind of distress that leads to extreme actions, such as suicide and righteous vigilantism due to a feeling that the official systems under which they operate to serve and protect are unjust, corrupt or inadequate.

However, while psychological manifestations of moral injury are the smoke, the existential wound is the fire.

Moral injury is bound to one's sense of self, meaning and moral identity. Understanding moral injury and being able to address it may prove to be instrumental to how we learn to prevent harm not only to the individual experiencing it, but also improve the systems and operational processes that are morally misaligned and contribute to perpetuating harm.

Introducing moral injury for combat veterans

Early formulations of moral injury, derived from research with Vietnam-era veterans, have emphasized moral transgressions rooted in leadership failures. Moral injury has historically been understood to arise under three specific conditions, “a betrayal of what’s right, by someone who holds legitimate authority, in a high-stakes situation.”

Subsequent formulations, informed by research with veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, shifted the analytical focus toward the individual’s own moral agency, decision-making and perceived failures. In this context, moral injury is associated with exposure to potentially injurious experiences involving “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations,” where such violations produce “lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact.”

For combatants, particularly those with multiple deployments, the conditions of combat have produced moral transgressions that resulted in an ontological wound, or a profound, foundational injury to a person’s sense of being, reality and existence. These individuals who made choices with the information presented to them, but nevertheless who transgressed core values, have since experienced identity collapse.

Extending moral injury to trust and safety professionals

Increasingly, the experience of trust and safety employees engaged in online conflict bears striking parallels to combatants deployed in the traditional, physical world.

As with traditional combatants who suffer from physical and emotional injuries received during a physical conflict and must contend with the ethical challenges of a role where they may take actions in discordance with their morals, employees of tech platforms responsible for handling online conflict often experience moral injury.

Trust and safety employees are similarly tasked with responding to diverse and intense crises, requiring discerning judgment and the assumption of the ethical responsibility to protect people from harm. Such experiences can manifest in emotional exhaustion and related forms of psychological strain that require deliberate processing and collective support.

Given that moral injury is as much about society’s avoidance and denial as it is about the ethical burdens that veterans bear, collective recognition of these harms is a critical component to healing.

Moral injury results in overwhelming distress felt under the weight of an irreconcilable ethical crisis causing an ontological rift that is not effectively managed by individual, personal psychotherapy.

Perhaps more common is moral injury born from witnessing harms that are within reach to mitigate, and instead making the collective choice to deprioritize or ignore it. It is incredibly difficult to reconcile the feelings of inadequacy in the face of known and preventable harms because challenging the logic of an authority risks undermining team alignment.

For those who have experienced layoffs, a common occurrence in the industry since 2022, this injury can manifest as the acute recognition that efforts to prevent or mitigate harm are likely to be weakened or discontinued due to the loss of institutional capacity and internal advocacy.

Additionally, as betrayal is a common cause for moral injury, the Trump administration’s current treatment of trust and safety employees as adversaries, including through the recent prohibitions on H-1B visas for highly-skilled workers involved in "censorship of protected expression,” is yet another potential source of moral injury.

Ultimately, for employees on trust and safety teams, moral injury is not an aberration but a recurring condition, reflecting the inherent ethical burdens embedded in these roles.

The issue of systemic moral injury is particularly acute for content moderators and data labelers who, in order to be steadily employed and do what’s considered a good job, must comply with decisions and roles that they are ethically in conflict with and know are personally harmful and damaging to society.

The majority of full-time trust and safety workers operate in the Global Minority, particularly across North America and Europe. In contrast, the global content moderation and data labeler workforce operates disproportionately in the Global Majority, particularly in countries including Kenya, Nigeria, India and the Philippines. This work is tedious and at times dangerous, often situated in unhealthy conditions.

Legal actions starting in 2023 across Africa, notably in Kenya, have exposed the human cost behind AI development, for example. Kenyan content moderators employed by Sama to annotate graphic content on behalf of Meta and OpenAI filed lawsuits citing PTSD, depression and anxiety after reviewing violent and sexual content, with pay as low as a couple dollars an hour. Dozens of workers brought claims of unfair dismissal, union suppression and insufficient mental‑health support. These lawsuits challenge the ethics and legality of outsourcing annotation labor, framing it as a form of modern digital extraction and colonialism.

Current efforts are inadequate

Moral injury is not a fear-based wound or the result of distorted thinking. Rather, it is an ontological wound, in which a combatant made the best choice with the information at hand, and yet still transgressed their value system. Therefore, a pathology-based approach doesn’t meaningfully serve the affected veteran. In fiscal year 2025, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs was allocated $583 million specifically for suicide prevention initiatives, and invested significantly in suicide prevention, but this investment has not yet significantly reduced the number of veterans who commit suicide.

Moral injury is prevalent — at least 50% of combat veterans show signs of moral injury — but existing efforts fail to restore meaning. For example, a suicide prevention hotline catches people as they fall, but it doesn’t address upstream issues. If we understand the why and how, we need to move through the shame and grief and go upstream to create the conditions for healing and prevention to occur, and to restore meaning, purpose, connection and identity.

Looking ahead: More research on moral injury for trust and safety professionals is needed

We recognize that there is a continuum of moral stress and conditions leading to moral injury and the collapse of identity, and that people with proximity to direct violence or combat may experience more potent and traumatic symptoms.

However, as online violence and conflict is directly linked to direct violence and more aggressively amplified harms, the weight of ethical responsibility and effect from its potential fall-out is more deeply felt than ever. The consequences of leaving moral injury undiagnosed and untreated bears more significant risk to society.

We are keen to extend research on moral injury to trust and safety professionals, given shared symptomology by individuals in both communities and trace the conditions that lead to systemic yet preventable moral injury.

Healing can come from deeper investigation into moral lines, and where work transgresses upon those lines. Naming imposed systems or corporate decisions that are morally injurious towards people, setting clearer boundaries and challenging the systems themselves can help to address this issue and improve the integrity of the systems overall.

Ultimately, the conditions that facilitate moral injury don’t just impact individuals. Rather, given that these individuals are critical to addressing offline and online harm, their strain reverberates widely, adversely impacting their communities and the wider environment.