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.

A transcript of this discussion is forthcoming.