Through to Thriving: Finding Balance and Resilience in the Trust & Safety Field

For a special series of episodes that will air throughout the year, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli is hosting a discussions designed to help envision possible futures—for tech and tech policy, for democracy, and society—beyond the present moment, dubbed Through to Thriving. Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

Welcome to another episode of Through to Thriving, a special podcast series where we are talking with technology policy practitioners who can help us explore futures beyond our current moment. For this episode, I spoke with two experts on Trust & Safety about balance and resilience in a notoriously difficult field.

• Alice Hunsberger is the head of Trust & Safety at Musubi, a firm that sells AI content moderation solutions.
• Jerrel Peterson is the director of content policy at Spotify.

Together, they’ve been working in the field for over two decades. Both found their way into the work through unconventional paths, Jerrel as a trained social worker and aspiring legislator, and Alice as a documentary film editor. We talked about how they broke into the field, why they continue to love the work, their feelings about the current state of industry-wide rollback of policies, how to better the working relationship between civil society and industry, and their advice for the next generation of practitioners.

I asked Jerrel and Alice to describe their feelings about the current state of the T&S industry, especially compared to when they first entered it:

Jerrel: It's complicated. You know, I always start my day with gratitude. I'm grateful to have a job. I'm grateful to work on things that are impactful, that mean a lot to me. There are a lot of really strong professionals who are out there who do not have a job right now or who are worried about their career. So gratitude first. But there's a lot of polarization among people. There's a lot of tension and fear about global economies, about technology, about climate disasters.There's all kinds of wars. And Trust & Safety folks have to sit at the center. We can't ignore it. I still love it. But it is still complicated. It has not gotten any easier for us.

Alice: Now everybody has an opinion about Trust & Safety. The last couple years, just in the political climate that we have, especially in the US, everybody's thinking about censorship and moderation and Big Tech…Whereas when I first started 15, 20 years ago, people were like, wait, there's you? You look at my account and decide whether I'm breaking rules? Like, what on Earth? There are people who do that? Nobody had any idea. And that was exhausting to explain that your job even exists. And now it's exhausting explaining why your job exists for a good reason.

We also spoke about how they felt, as members of marginalized communities, to watch the rollback of platform policies that has been happening across the industry:

Jerrel: It's hard. No one has asked me that question. This is my first time kind of verbalizing how I feel. But I think horror is the best way to describe it. Primarily because I think about how much work goes into policy development if you're going to do it at scale in ways that are consistent and fair. So to see policies and processes be rolled back without the same amount of rigor and consideration, that is the part that's hard because again, it implies that these were just words that were written and now they are no longer here. And that's not how we think about law making. That's not how we think about the Constitution. I think it's that part that really makes this challenging to see.

Alice: I think your point about things being rolled back without the same level of rigor or thought is definitely a pattern that I've seen and heard about, and I think that's the part that hurts the most. It's like, if you're going to put hateful, bigoted policies in place, at least measure what their impact is gonna be and own up to it.

I asked Jerrel and Alice about what keeps them resilient and balanced despite the challenges that they described:

Jerrel: I used to get the question all the time and the question was: How do you sleep at night? Knowing that all these things are happening, knowing that all that stuff is bad, knowing that I just told you I had a really horrible experience on your platform. And for me, what kept me asleep is I knew where we were going. I have visibility into our roadmaps. I knew that things were going to get better. That help was coming for certain issues. I knew what we were thinking about, and I try to always focus on the future because from there, I can work backwards. Like here's how we're gonna make sure this never happens to somebody else or to another community. That future orientation I still use today and that helps.

Alice: I love what you said about being forward thinking. I think remembering the impact that I've had and the things that I've changed for the better is so helpful when I'm feeling hopeless about the state of things. And, the importance of community, I think the last thing is just always coming back to community again. Trying as much as possible to connect with people and stay curious and say yes to random meetings when I can and chat with people and make new friends and feel less alone and feel like I can mentor and be mentored and learn new things and teach new things. All of those things keep me motivated and interested and kind of zoomed out a little bit and less in my own head about whatever daily problems I'm dealing with.

I also asked Alice and Jerrel for their advice for the future generations of T&S practitioners:

Alice: It's impossible to do the work and not be impacted. There's no way you will not be. You absolutely will be. This work is rewarding and amazing and also heartbreaking and traumatizing. It's all of these things at once. There's no way to know exactly what it's going to feel like until you jump in and do it. So, you know, be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. Be careful. Talk to people and have a sense of what you're getting into, as much as you can.

Jerrel: Folks should be really focused on their why. Because this is thankless work. People don't know you exist. They don't know how to solve your problem, but they have lots of opinions about it. Knowing what your why is and what keeps you here is important. And I think that can also sustain folks too. We need professionals who are practitioners for the long run, not just today.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Hey, y'all. Welcome to another episode of our special podcast series Through to Thriving. I am your host and a Tech Policy Press fellow, Anika Collier Navaroli, and I am talking to some brilliant tech policy folks and we are exploring futures beyond our current moment. Today, I am speaking to some OGs in the world of trust and safety, Alice Hunsberger and Jerrel Peterson. We are going to be talking about balance and resiliency in notoriously hard industry. Y'all, welcome to the podcast.

Jerrel Peterson:

Thank you for having us.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Of course.

Alice Hunsberger:

Thank you.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Alice, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners and letting them know how long you've been working in trust and safety?

Alice Hunsberger:

I'm Alice Hunsberger. I have two definitions for how long I've been working in trust and safety so-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Give them both to us.

Alice Hunsberger:

As a paid profession since 2010, so 15 years paid, but I actually got started in trust and safety about five or six years before that because I created a little internet message board with a few thousand people and very quickly discovered you need policies and governance and enforcement when you get random people on the internet. So I'd been doing trust and safety for a few years before that, but in a volunteer community way, not professionally.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Well, thank you so much for joining us, Alice. Jerrel, I'm going to kick it over to you to introduce yourself.

Jerrel Peterson:

I'm Jerrel. I've been in this industry for a little over 10 years at this point. Before this work, I started my career as a social worker and was working with vulnerable populations and then transitioned into public policy, and like a lot of folks who've been doing this for as long as I have, you fall into this. I did not know what trust anded safety was. I didn't know that platforms had them. I found myself laid off in San Francisco and a friend encouraged me to think about it and explore it and I did some informational interviews and here I am all this time later and still loving it, I should say, too.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

I love that you said you're still loving it because we're definitely going to get into how we're feeling about the industry back then, what it is now, what it used to be, all of those things. For full disclosure out here, Jerrel used to be my boss six years ago and actually is the person who brought me into the trust and safety world. So I owe so much of this in this conversation that we're going to have to Jerrel and to the experience that you have and that you brought into this space, and so I'm really excited to be able to talk to both of you all again because you've been doing this work for so long.

I know trust and safety has got really hot over the last couple of years, and to hear you all saying you've been doing this for so long before it had this name, before it had these two words in an ampersand, this has been the work that so many folks have been doing. I know you mentioned a little bit about it, but what drew you into the work? Jerrel, you're saying you had no idea what trust and safety was. Same.

Jerrel Peterson:

Yeah. I had no idea what it was, but then I realized the reasons I wasn't using Twitter and socials generally at the time were trust and safety reason. And so, full transparency, everyone who knows me knows at that time of my life I wanted to be a senator in California. That was my plan. I was working towards it. I spent majority of my time for the nonprofits working within Sacramento trying to get on that path and I didn't want a Tweet to ruin that for me, take it out of context. I had heard about all the abuse and harassment that happens to folks, particularly to women, particularly to people of color, and I was like, I don't want any part of that if I'm going to have a successful political career.

I also was concerned about privacy. Where does all this information go and who keeps it and for what purposes? All of those things, and then talking to T&S persons, they were like, "Well, duhDoug, you should be working over here. This is exactly what we think about all day." And so, I really fell into it and lucked out that I found my people. I'm not an engineer, and most of the folks who were working in T&SS at that time also weren't necessarily technical. Some of them had some data science skills, but a lot of them came from government, they came from nonprofits, they came from law enforcement, some social workers too, and so it just felt right there.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Alice, back to your website. What got you into this work?

Alice Hunsberger:

Similarly, I fell into it, so I fell into the website that I did because I love community and creating communities. I've done community stuff in person. I was doing community stuff online. It's been a through line for me for a really long time. Similarly, I had another career before trust and safety, so I was a documentary film editor and I did that for many years. But then-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Multi-faceted, Alice.

Jerrel Peterson:

I didn't know that about you either.

Alice Hunsberger:

Yeah, weirdly, it uses the same skills. So as a documentary editor, you have to look at thousands of hours of raw footage and piece the story to together from it and find the patterns and find the why behind it, and that's exactly what you do when you're looking at thousands of bad actors or millions of bad actors and trying to figure out why are they doing this? What's the human element behind it? What's the way to make a pattern understandable to other people? How do you tell that story? A lot of the work that I do in trust and safety is storytelling both to users and also execs. I'm like, this is what you should care. And documentary film editing is exactly the same.

But in 2009, the economy crashed. Nobody was making little documentaries anymore. I wasn't totally sure if that's what I wanted to do. I was open to other things and I knew people who had co-founded this little dating app called OkCupid that had 20 employees at the time and needed somebody to moderate scammers, and I had as much experience as anybody because I've been doing this independently for a while and back then, this is before social media existed, so the only people who knew how to do this kind of thing were people who had been doing it independently. And so, it sounded interesting to me, so I was like, sure. And then, I realized I loved it a lot more as a career when it wasn't personal. When I was personally founder of a community, the stakes felt a lot more personal, and when I had the backing of a company and anybody to some extent, then it became much more manageable.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Can I ask you all this, Jerrel, you mentioned you'd still love it unless you're talking about what it felt like back then, what did it feel like back then to be in the industry that was behind these closed doors that nobody knew about this clandestine kind of thing?

Alice Hunsberger:

It was wild. Nobody knew anything at all. There were no standards and best practices. Everybody who I've talked to who did trust and safety back then, it didn't occur to them that there were other people doing trust and safety who they could talk to and bounce ideas off of. So we were all in our own little silos, feeling on our own, trying to figure everything out from scratch again. There's no conferences, there's no shared Slack groups, there's no way to meet people, so it felt very isolating, and there also, at least for me in those early days, probably because I was at a startup, I hope that most startups these days actually do have better practices, but there's just a lot of ship things quickly and think about safety later, not because anybody didn't care about the users and didn't care about safety, the founders absolutely did, but we just hadn't learned those lessons yet, hadn't had it drilled into us that there were checks.

And so, there's a lot of just reactive scrambling, I think, and you asked whether I still love it, I still love it today, I still love working trust and safety all these many years later, but I definitely would not want to go back to those days. I'm glad things have evolved since then.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Jerrel, your pause. Go ahead and explain that.

Jerrel Peterson:

Safety definitely evolved since then. It was also exciting too because I started in trust and safety at a really big platform as well that people used and people talked about and was in the news all the time. And so, seeing some of the projects that I got to work on my personalyity be like do y'all really want me to work on this? Do y'all care what I have to say about this for this really big platform that means so much to people in the world? And to be honest, I didn't even have an account on that platform, so it didn't really mean that much to me when I started. So seeing that too, and the intellectual curiosity that I brought to it and the really fun challenges, the thing about trust and safety issues is the rabbit hole is deep. If you go-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

You start digging.

Jerrel Peterson:

And I would find myself down these really deep rabbit holes feeling like how I felt when I got to college for the first time when people presented me with ideas. I thought I knew a lot about the world when I was 17, but then you get to college, you're like, it is so much bigger than you thought and the issues are so much more complex that you could work on, and that's how it felt when I started but scary.

As a social worker, we had the National Association of Social Workers to fall back on what's had ethics that we all had to agree to. We all got the same amount of education, so every social worker unit knows how to coach, knows how to do a little bit of therapy, knows a lot of really basic things, and in T&S, we were learning it as we were going, or I think a better way to think about is it we were applying research frameworks outside of our industry to our work and hoping that they would stick to and the effort to try to use best practice when there weren't really established norms across the industry at that time.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

I think it's really interesting that you both mentioned the lack of standards and lack of best practices that existed back then. We're talking about a decade and longer ago. Take us a little bit to present-day moment. So we have some of those best practices, we have established some of those standards and we're in a different space. What does it feel like now? You say you both love it, but what does it feel like to be sitting in this space that now just is in the hot seat?

Alice Hunsberger:

I think in a lot of ways, it still feels the same. One of the things that I love about trust and safety as it is always changing, like you said, there's always new rabbit holes to go down and new things to discover. I think especially now with AI, things are changing like crazy. We are having to think about trust and safety, moderating content for prompts to generate AI content, and then we have to moderate the output from those prompts. And so, there's all new layers of things that we have to be thinking about in terms of trust and safety that we hadn't before, but that makes it fascinating and interesting and we're still learning as we go. I think there definitely are places where we can meet each other. There's conferences, there's a professional organization, there's all these things that we didn't have before, which means I now have friends in the industry who I can call and be like, "This is a problem that I'm thinking about. What are some ways that you've come across this?"

So that's infinitely helpful, but I don't know that we have all the answers. We barely have education, definitely not standardized education for trust and safety people. We still come from all backgrounds. I think that's the strength of trust and safety that we all come with different skills and different backgrounds, but it also means there's a lot of translation if people move from one company to another or they come into the industry. What people think, what they assume can be very, very, very different things because there's no standardization. That's a good thing and a bad thing. There's pros and cons to it. So I think in a lot of ways we're in a better place, but I think compared to other professions and other industries, we're probably still closer to those early days of the internet than a lot of other people working in tech or working outside of tech today.

Jerrel Peterson:

I strongly agree. To the point of professionalization, I remember when I first started in trust and safety, Instagram used to host this meetup for folks in Silicon Valley to come and talk primarily about mental health and not necessarily mental health for practitioners, but mental health as it relates to moderating online content. And it felt like, although it was at Instagram, it had a really nice office, it felt like this hodgepodge of folks. And then when I look back on it, I'm like, these are some of the big names in trust and safety right now. We all used to meet in a small conference room with little sandwiches and have experts come talk to us about the fact that our users are on a mental health spectrum.

And if you're enforcing your policies, not knowing that people have depression, not knowing that people are having manic disorder, all of those things. And it just felt like, wow, we are on the vanguard by just even having any of these conversations at this point. And I think again, in the context of social work, the practices, these standards have been existed for a very long time or journalists too, which I know is where you come from. And it's like these things have been around for a very, very long time. Us figuring out now, it's fantastic for the industry, but late in the game.

The other thing I would say about how it feels right now is it's complicated. I always start my day with gratitude. I'm grateful to have a job. I'm grateful to work on things that are impactful, that mean a lot to me. There are a lot of really strong translated professionals who are out there who do not have jobsour job right now or who are worried about their career, so gratitude first. But there's a lot of polarization among people, and it's not unique to one or two countries everywhere. There's a lot of tension and fear about global economies, about technology, about climate disasters. We are seeing one play out in front of us right now too, where there's a lot of loss of life. There's all kinds of wars. And trust and safety folks have to sit at the center. We can't ignore it because these conversations are happening online in content and in interactions. And so, exciting, fun, all of those things. I still love it, but it is still complicated. It has not gotten any easier for us.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I think that is one of the things that I don't know that I was necessarily prepared for before I went into working in trust and safety was being in the middle of that space. You mentioned this small room, this little room, this little vanguard, and I didn't think I would understand what it felt like in some ways to be isolated. And to me, this group of folks who were doing this work that nobody really knows about but everybody has opinions about, I mean, Jerrel, we worked at a place that had a whole Slack channel that was dedicated to the entire company being able to express their opinions expressly about the things that our team was doing. And so, there was no winning coming from anywhere.

And to say, I've been working in academia these days and I was having a conversation with colleagues at a school that has been going through some things and they were saying where we have folks that don't want to work with us and these folks that are writing petitions and people just don't understand that it's just good people sitting inside of a place trying to do good work. And I was sitting over there and I started laughing and I was like, "Hey, now you know what it feels like to work in trust and safety. Now you know what that thing is like." And I think that it is something that a lot of folks don't understand and they see it as a, I think it comes off as a protection mechanism or something like an armor and a guard. And I don't think that folks really understand the depth of the centeredness of the world that we end up being in those spaces.

Jerrel Peterson:

Well, 100%]. And it was surprising to me as well, but it wasn't new. And I'll never forget a recruiter, this was years ago, had reached out to me and saw that I was a social worker and saw that that was what my masters is in. And basically she was like, "Well, help me understand how you could add value to my company because all social workers do is take people's kids away." I was just like, "No, she didn't." She also doesn't have any social workers in her universe. It was very obvious too and social workers do a lot of things in this world beyond that. And so, being in T&S and having people not understand your work or why it matters or not, at least on face value know anyone who does this wasn't new for me, but also still it's a bit unexpected.

And I think that's one of the things that when I think about what drains me, that is one of the things that drains me, still having to help folks, even at companies that have trust and safety teams know that these teams exist and we're not just waiting to be activated in the wings. I push back on all those Avengers stuff. I'm not just waiting somewhere for a catastrophe. We are always writing, we're always researching, we're always thinking, and these rabbit holes, always protecting even when no one knows we're all that part. It's draining to have to do that PR, I think is as Alice described it.

Alice Hunsberger:

Even what you just said, it's really hard to prove your value when you do your job right and nothing happens. When you're noticed and trust and safety is usually not for a good reason.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Not a good thing.

Alice Hunsberger:

But then it's really easy to be taken for granted and to be set aside and it's draining to have to fight for continued resources to prove that you're not a cost center. And frankly, I don't know if it's better, now everybody has an opinion about trust and safety. It's been the last couple years, just in the political climate that we have, especially in the US, like everybody's thinking about censorship and moderation and big tech, and it's a thing that everyone's thinking about and everybody knows about trust and safety. Whereas when I first started 15, 20 years ago, people were like, wait, there's you look at my account and decide whether I'm breaking rules, what on earth? There are people who do that? Nobody had any idea. And that was exhausting too, to explain that your job even exists and now it's exhausting being explaining why your job exists for a good reason. I don't know which is worse. They're both bad.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah. I think the trust and safety are these two great concepts, of course, that were put together. But I think the reality is is that you don't necessarily feel trust or safety, but you feel the absence of both. And so, when you're doing the job well, you're not getting the requests for comment from the New York Times on how amazing and how safe people are and the days that went by that no catastrophe happened, but you are definitely in the space of consistently having to be on the frontlines of dealing with everything, as you mentioned, Jerrel, the things that are happening in the world. So let me ask you all, given all of this, given the polarization, given the complexity, why do you still choose to work in the industry?

Jerrel Peterson:

For me, this work is still important. People still live a big part of their lives online and they have to engage with others and it doesn't feel like it's going to go away. And so, there's a lot happening there. And we talked about how complicated this is. We talked about the changes in technology, political landscape, all of those things. It keeps me excited and a lot of times it's not always healthy. We'll talk about resilience and well-being, but I'm always like, if not me, then who?

And I think as a social worker, I bring a very unique and interesting perspective to how we do this work that is inclusive, that is people-centered, not just people as an end users, but also our partners, people who review content, the people who write the policy, people who enforce it, people who defend it on public policy teams. And I worry sometimes that there is always a risk that I could, or people who think like me could be replaced with folks who care a lot less, who just want to make money in tech. And I think our industry invites not reallynot to really good democracy-oriented people, but not always as well. And so, I'm like, if I left or I think one of my goals, things I want to leave behind is lots of folks who were thinking and doing this work for the right reasons and that keeps me excited and keeps me here. I see it happening.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

What about you, Alice?

Alice Hunsberger:

So well said. I agree. I have a lot of very strong opinions and not everybody's implemented them, so I feel like my work isn't done yet. When everyone has perfect policies at every platform, then I can retire. I think too, another thing that keeps me coming back, I mean beyond feeling like I have an impact, feeling like I'm doing a good job, feeling like I do have some kind of natural resilience that many others don't that enables me to keep doing this work is the community, the people that I get to talk to, the people that I get to work with and collaborate with conversations like this. It's so healing and gratifying and I don't know, I would miss going to a job that has less impact and less of because the stakes are so high, we all have to take it so seriously and we all care so much. And that feeling of being in it together, maybe it's slight trauma bonding, which maybe again is not the most healthy thing, but that feeling sucks you in. It keeps you going.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Sure does.

Alice Hunsberger:

That's part of it.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Jerrel, you said that there's good work still to be done, and that reminds me of something that one of old colleagues, Olivia Conti said, I think on LinkedIn the other day. She was talking about had their chatbot that was having their sexual conversations with minors and was saying, I think the Wall Street Journal called it an extensive lobbying campaign that happened internally. And Olivia was saying what that actually is is individual contributors who are working inside of a trust and safety team, who are burning their own social capital, who are working behind the scenes that are quietly escalating these concerns over and over and over again, and the reality that even in this moment when we recognize the rollback that has happened, that power still works.

And I hear you, Jerrel, and the like, what happens if those folks aren't there? What if folks like you all aren't there anymore? So speaking of the rollback of policies, we all know this has been happening. Trust and safety teams have being pulled back and fired, and so many things are going on. And we have recognized that I think I was talking to someone the other day and told them, "Oh, well what did you used to do?" And I mentioned, "I worked at Twitter, I wrote thewith policies." And theyI said like, "Well, everything you wrote must have been gone by now." And I'm like, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, that is the place that we are currently in." And they're like, "How do you feel about that?"

And I think I have my own feelings, but I would love to ask you, I think we all identify as members of the alphabet mafia over here, so we see what's happening to our community and how does it feel to be sitting here in this moment and recognizing what's going on?

Jerrel Peterson:

It's hard. It's hard. No one has asked me that question. This is my first time verbalized actually how I feel. But I think horror is the Horace best way to describe it, and primarily because I think about how much work goes into policy development, if you're going to do it at scale in ways that are consistent and fair, people always ask me, "Well, just write a new policy. Why are we having... Just write a new policy." And then I'm like, "Okay, great." "Well, write a new policy. Here's the timeline." And they're surprised when it's months long and they're like, "Well, isn't writing just typing it on their computer?" And it's no, drafting language is obviously part of it, but there's the research piece, there's the industry assessment, how doare other platforms handle this? Are their best practices out there? Just feedback collection from legal and public policy and government affairs and enforcement teams too. There's testing it against thousands of examples of lots of different languageslanguage to ensure that we can replicate this. And in some cases, Anika knows well, this is getting explicit sign off from executives across the business-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

The whole company.

Jerrel Peterson:

... and the executives sit in different parts of the world. So we are getting so much alignment. And so, to see policies and processes be rolled back without the same amount of rigor and consideration, that is the part that's hard. Because again, it implies that these were just words that were written and now they're no longer here, and that's not how we think about lawmaking. That's not how we think about the constitution. And so, it's just that part I think is the part that really makes this challenging to see.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Alice?

Alice Hunsberger:

I haven't had the same experience. As far as I know, none of the major policies that I've written have been totally rolled back, so I haven't gone through that level of grief, but I'm sure it'll happen someday. Maybe it's happened that I just don't, choose not to look and know about it. But collectively, looking at all the hard work that people have done at platforms and serving, being an outsider looking in and seeing these things roll back and knowing how much care is put into it is heartbreaking for all of us, especially when you know things can be better. They were better. I think that part feels really frustrating. And I think your point about things being rolled back without the same level of rigor or thought is definitely a pattern that I've seen and heard about. I think that's the part that hurts the most. It's like if you're going to put hateful, bigoted policies in place, at least measure what their impact is going to be and own up to it.

Jerrel Peterson:

One of the things you said earlier though, Alice, that really stuck with me too is like you were half joking, but you're like, "Not everybody listens to me when I say it too." And it's something that I think is an underrated or under-talked about skill in our industry and its influence. We can be part and we should be practitioners and we should be metrics and data-driven, but the way you get companies of thousands of people to change is by building relationships and asking questions in the right way, connecting the dots for folks and constantly educating and hitting them over the head. And that's something that I think I would want more people to lean into. Even if you're the smartest person in the room to get a company to think differently and be accountable for harm, simply because their platform exists is hard to do and research can only get you so far, relationships and showing up as a trusted stakeholder who people can depend on actually is what changes the dial and the temperature internally. So I'm right there with Alice, y'all start listening to me eventually, but that's not-

Alice Hunsberger:

Well, 100% all of that. This also might be a little bit of a tangent, but-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Let's go.

Alice Hunsberger:

... I'm going to go for it. I think that we as the tech industry, social media are moving, have moved already, are in a space where platforms are no longer always trying to be one size fits all, one bland generic policy for every single social media platform that's exactly the same. We're seeing platforms differentiate often based on CEO values, and I think that's going to happen more and more, but that also leaves open room for people to create and advocate for policies that are even more inclusive, even more thoughtful, even more freedom-based, but also human rights-based.

And something that I try to do as much as I can is share what I've tried, share what I think works, share what I've done. When I was at Grindr, I was trying to push some of the nudity policies forward as an industry because I felt like we could push the boundaries a little bit more than other people could. But I documented all of it and I wrote about it and I said, "Here's how we did it. Here's all the safeguards we had to put into place."

And so, even if you are at a relatively small platform, I think pushing back and also sharing can push forward other people and give them the cover and say, "Oh, hey, these other people did this. It's something that exists. This policy is a good idea." As an industry, we can all do it together, even if I'm not at a platform anymore and I still have lots of opinions about policy and I write about it all the time, but I found people sometimes are scared to say these things out loud or to have really strong opinions. It definitely can have an effect on your career. There were places where I will probably never be hired because of the things that I've said.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Same, girl.

Alice Hunsberger:

Yeah, it's okay. It's all good.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

I appreciate that. You said something in there, Alice, which I just want to acknowledge what you mentioned, the grief and the hurt that comes along with so much of this work. And I would love to talk a little bit more then about and feeling these very complex feelings that are very, very deep. How do you all find balance or resilience or the ability to not just survive, but to thrive and still be in this place within trust and safety?

Jerrel Peterson:

Yeah, there are a couple of things that come to mind for me. I always try to be future-oriented. I used to get the question all the time and the question was how do you sleep at night knowing that all these things are happening, knowing that all that stuff is bad, knowing I just told you I had a really horrible experience on your platform, that's the worst thing in the world, why did you even create it? And for me, what kept me asleep is I knew where we were going. I had visibility into our roadmaps. I knew that things were going to get better, that help was coming for certain issues. I knew what we were thinking about and I try to always focus on the future and I can work backwards. Here's how we're going to make sure this never happened to somebody else or to another community or that kind of thing. That future orientation, I still use today and that helps.

But I encourage folks to also be curious about the complex ways that we can manage some of the issues we see today. A lot of platforms still exist in the binary or leaving things up and taking them down. There's so much innovation that's happened over the past two years. I'll never forget, Eric Goldman published a paper years ago that basically mapped all of the interventions that every major platform does. And it was like leave up and take down, plus 30 other things, multiple categories that they can do from demonetization to education to interstitials to resource and all that stuff.

And I remember how freeing and exciting that was to reach because I'm like, we could do half those things and significantly improve the experience of users on our platform. And I've seen lots of other very basic interventions being used in really meaningful ways. The example I always come back to, I was literally talking about it today with a senior person on our team was Netflix. And so, you all remember years ago there was the shooting in Texas of elementary school students, and Anika was looking at me like, which one?

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Right. Unfortunately, but yes.

Jerrel Peterson:

And the news that was happening and what was also happening at that time is Netflix was about to premiere Stranger Things too, which was huge. And I watched Stranger Things and we were glued and ready for it to come up so we could stream it. And I'm sure there was a conversation about whether or not they should premiere it because the first scene started with what seemed like kids being killed in a school. Now, obviously no one could have predicted that. I'm sure there were questions about should this be here or not, are we going to promote it? And what Netflix did was put it in its digital, it's like, hey, this may be sensitive for folks because it was untimely because it would be really concerning for people. And that was a choice that said a lot about what the company stands for and what they want to be in the world, but also gave folks a heads-up because this was unfolding in a way that folks couldn't anticipate.

And for me, no platform is perfect, but that's an example that encouraged me to push people in thinking about for a T&S person, they're always like, we have to take this down is the first question and what is my argument for or against, as opposed to what are the other ways that we can show up for communities or platforms can show up for communities that they care about and invest in or keep people safe beyond just those difficult conversations because it's always a high bar regardless of where you work, saying that this content shouldn't exist or be accessible in any way is a really, really high bar for platforms. I think they host the world's information or the world's music or the world's content too.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah. Alice, did I hear you correctly when you said buy more plants? Is that what you said?

Alice Hunsberger:

I don't know if I ever said that.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Okay, I'm sorry. What did you do? I'm sorry. Maybe that's me over here just projecting onto you.

Alice Hunsberger:

I mean, I do. I love gardening and cooking. Those are my two de-stressing things to do something with the senses and my physical body. I go for long walks in the woods. I live in the middle of the woods. I don't live in a city. Having that balance in my life where when I'm done with work, I'm done with technology is really, really helpful, especially because I self-sabotage because my main hobby is trust and safety and my job is also trust and safety. So I do all kinds of trust and safety stuff outside of my 9:00 to 5:00. So I really need to unplug when I'm done.

I love what you said about being forward-thinking. I think remembering the impact that I've had and the things that I've changed for the better is so helpful when I'm feeling hopeless about the state of things. And then, I've also tried to have variety in the work that I do and the kinds of things that I do the last couple years. I was at dating apps for 13 years and I was like, I need to do something different and just scratch a different itch. And that's been really, really helpful for me. Being on the service provider side of things comes with its own set of stresses, but I work for a trust and safety company. We do not have to justify why trust and safety is important. We exist for trust and safety. The CEO loves trust and safety. That is what we do all day. I don't have to justify my existence at all, and that is actually a huge mental burden that has been lifted.

So just being intentional that that's what I needed at this time in my life and my career was like to not justify my existence. That's been really helpful as well. And then, I think the last thing is just always coming back to community again, trying as much as possible to connect with people and stay curious and say yes to random meetings when I can and chat with people and make new friends and feel less alone and feel like I can mentor and be mentored and learn new things and teach new things. All of those things keeps me motivated and interested and zoomed out a little bit and less in my own head about whatever daily problems I'm dealing with.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

I appreciate you.

Jerrel Peterson:

Plus one in the community.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah. I appreciate y'all sharing that. I think remembering the impact that you've had is something that really resonated with me. I think I worked in academia and industry in civil society and been around and I consistently look back on the work that I did in trust and safety as some of the most impactful that I was ever able to do, just being able to directly have my hands on the work. I have a couple more questions that I want to ask you all. One, just saying, having worked in all these various places and working in tech policy, how do we, how do trust and safety folks, how folks within industry work better with folks who are within academia, with folks who are in civil society, with folks who are coming from nonprofits? How do we work better together since I recognize that so many of us have the same goals and are working towards the same ends and don't necessarily end up working that well together historically?

Alice Hunsberger:

Yeah, such a good one. I had a conversation with Jenni Olson from GLAAD about this. She and I collaborate a lot on things.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

She's great.

Alice Hunsberger:

We've become-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Shout out to Jenni. Yes.

Jerrel Peterson:

Shout out. Love you, Jenni.

Alice Hunsberger:

But she always jokes that her job is to yell at people at platforms but in a nice way. And I think there's a lot of people who feel like that's their job, but I'll say as somebody who was at a platform doesn't feel good to be yelled at.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Nope.

Alice Hunsberger:

Especially if you are somebody who deeply cares and is trying to do their best and trying to use, you were talking about earlier the scrap of influence, they have the scrap of power, they're using it all up to advance your ideas and then to be told the company you work for is evil and you guys don't care. It's like, well, there's always people who care. There's always people who are trying. And so, I think my biggest advice is to remember the company as a whole, capital letters, the company is not the individuals who work there. And that back channel conversations and just meeting each other as humans are things that actually can often drive change in a way that the official meetings can't. And that goes both ways. If you're a trust and safety person and you're working on a policy, reach out and ask people's advice and be clear about what you personally can and cannot promise and can or can't deliver. But there's tons of people out there who are just desperate to have some hand in helping platforms be better. And so, take advantage of that as well.

Jerrel Peterson:

Yeah, I, as someone who has been yelled at a lot by industry groups, by journalists, by government actors, all kinds of folks, I think taking yourself out of it and realizing that there might be something there. And when you work within a company, it's like, oh, they ran a campaign against us. They're horrible. And it's like there actually might be something there for us to unpack and this is the tool that they have and we can't add a lot of our rights that we exist today. But because people use those tools to bring awareness and then bring change and put accountability on all institutions too, so that's their tool. And so I always, again, go back with curiosity, if they're making such a big fuss about the, what is that kernel of truth that we're not meeting an expectation or a standard, et cetera, and we can sit with that for a bit and in most cases actually something to be done to because of the skill we work with, then we miss a lot.

And so, I think that comfortability. But I also, to your question, they could think we have to be intentional about this. I've been to a lot of meetups in the Bay Area, abroad, and definitely in New York where these folks come together and we're really good at identifying challenges in those venues. And we all agree around the challenges. What we don't usually agree is what to do around them. And I liked the hackathon approaches to this work. I saw that Wikimedia just did something at the UN where basically they had all these folks in the room and were like, "We're going to update these thousands of pages to make sure there's accurate information about really important topics there too."

I also went to one, this was years ago, I think it was a CHI conference and maybe it was Montreal or Quebec, but it was the same thing. There were researchers from major platforms and trust and safety. There were all of the folks that we see on every safety advisory council and oversight board, all those folks who run plus the industry people. And we just solved problems. And half of the things I got a lot of credit for in my career came from those hackathons. I was like, this is stuff that I'm really proud to implement here, but this was not my idea. This came from someone else who was really, really smart. And then, we problem solved and then white boarded with a lot of other smart people from different walks of life to find ways that could stick and land. And not all the things have been implemented, but many. And so, I'd love to see a lot more of that happening.

Alice Hunsberger:

I also think we can be more upfront about trade-offs. One of my-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Say more.

Alice Hunsberger:

One of my biggest pet peeves with folks who are in these advocacy groups in general is they often have very niche things that they care about, which is great. We need specialists, we need people who deeply understand specific issues. And also when you are at a platform, there are trade-offs between safety and privacy. You increase one, the other might get worse. So there's trade-offs between freedom of expression and safety. Some people feel more safe when they're able to be totally anonymous. Other people feel really unsafe when there are anonymous people around and they don't know who they are. You can't have both. I think that's something that people who have this tunnel vision view often feel completely unwilling to compromise or to trade off things.

We see this in child safety as well with privacy concerns. And it's a tough one because everything, it all matters. It's all important. And we're trying to balance this as best we can as trust & safety professionals. And I think that those really uncomfortable trade-offs where nothing feels good, there's no answer that feels right, there's no solution that makes everybody happy. Those are things that we get used to doing that we sit with every day. But people outside of trust and safety who don't have to make those trade-offs or hard decisions, they don't understand how heartbreaking it is and how difficult it is and how unhappy we are. But there is no other way. So I think the more that we can talk about that and give clear examples, even which people of platforms probably aren't going to do much of, but I think that helps people understand and find ways to collaborate that maybe compromise a little bit more.

Jerrel Peterson:

Plus 1,000. We need to be more transparent around the trade-offs. And I tell my team all the time, "I'm not explaining our approach or giving the example, expecting someone to agree." We have experts come talk us all the time and they don't agree what should be done. But I want you to understand, I want them to understand the trade-offs that we're making because from there we can have a much productive conversation around what we can do here when you understand where we're coming from. And we could lean in a lot more, I think as an industry and then everything we do, especially if we are thinking about publishing policies in our approach externally, talk about the trade-offs and give examples there too.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah, I'm thinking about a lot of the words that have been used during our conversation today, and some of the ones that you just said, Alice, which were heartbreaking and unhappy. And we also mentioned grief. We also mentioned hurt, we also mentioned happiness and joy and impact and all of these things that are very full and very, very big emotions. And so, I would love to ask you all as we close out this conversation, the future of trust and safety is people are opining about that every single day. But I would wonder what advice or what would you tell someone who is thinking about coming into the industry of trust and safety for the very first time in beginning this work that so many of us have done for so many years, what would you tell them about the work? And especially this is another question that I've been asked, so if you wouldn't mind also just throwing this one in there too, is it possible to do this work without essentially becoming personally and mentally impacted? What do you think, Alice?

Alice Hunsberger:

It's impossible to do the work and not be impacted. There's no way. You will be. You absolutely will be. This work is rewarding and amazing and also heartbreaking and traumatizing. It's all of these things at once. I think like you were talking about earlier, there's no way to know exactly what it's going to feel like until you jump in and do it. And so, be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself, be careful, talk to people, have a sense of what you're getting into as much as you can. I think just as you will be affected, one thing that I've learned a lot over the years is I think there are some people who are naturally more resilient for one reason or another. And there are some people who are more likely to be impacted for one reason or another. And corporate wellness programs are all well and good. They're not going to fix somebody and suddenly turn them into a trust and safety superhero if they fundamentally are incompatible with this kind of work.

And similarly, these people like myself, I've been doing this for 20 years, by and large, I'm fine. It's not because I have the one magic trick that everybody needs to know or that there's the one magic wellness program, I don't know, five minutes of meditation a day and my problems are solved. I can't explain why I am generally okay. And so, I think just don't blame yourself personally if it feels like too much for you and you have to take a step back. It's not your own failing. There are other people who will care and will do a good job, and it's okay to step back and take a break. And similarly, if you're naturally pretty resilient and you're doing okay, look out for the other people, ask people if they're okay, take on some more burden if you can, just check in on folks. So I don't know that that's satisfying advice, but I don't think there's any, I've never heard any advice in this area that actually feels practical or helpful for every single person listening. It's so personal. It's so deeply individual.

Jerrel Peterson:

It is. It's really personal. And I think I want to underscore the points around being supports for each other, but also if you're a people manager, creating psychological safety on the team too, that people can be wrong and being wrong is fine and disagreeing is fine when there's no right answer. Like Alice said too, that is not, you didn't fail because you don't know what to do right now. If it was easy, someone else would've figured it out a long time ago. We wouldn't be talking about it as a team, especially when it comes to my level. I wouldn't be talking about it if it was straightforward, someone else would've solved it. And so, making sure it's okay that people can be wrong or unsure because that is the nature of the question that's being asked. But then, also something I always do is we let people retreat without any kind of fear for retaliation. So Anika knows there were some constant things that will come in that I just told this team, I don't like to deal.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Same.

Jerrel Peterson:

And I won't do that. And it's not a question, it's like, oh, that came in, I may not be … but I'll pick it up because I know Jerrel has an issue with that thing. And sometimes that's my entire week. Sometimes it's just a day. But building processes for people to be safe and be okay, have what they need, I think is important in addition to all the things that the companies do from a wellness perspective in terms of benefits and that kind of thing. Also, the last thing I'll say is folks should be really focused on their why too. Because this is thankless work. People don't know you exist. We talked about that. They don't know how to solve your problem, but they have lots of opinions about it too. Knowing what your why is and what keeps you here, it is important. And I think that can also sustain folks too. Don't just do it just because too. And we need professionals who are practitioners for the long run, not just today.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Well, Jerrel and Alice, thank you so much for joining me and talking a little bit more about the work of trust and safety and the emotions that it comes with and how you all are able to stay resilient and balanced in something that is so notoriously hard. And just to say, we appreciate you. I appreciate y'all. I know what it's like to do that work, and I am so thankful that I no longer have to do it. Shout out to you and to those of you all who are still honestly, truly, on the front lines doing this work every day in and out, because you are the folks that make the internet even a small semblance of the piece of safety that we have today that wouldn't be without y'all. So thank you and I appreciate you joining us today on the podcast.

Jerrel Peterson:

Thank you for having us.