Trust and Safety: What’s in a name?

Trust and Safety teams often carry a vision that sets them apart from other units within the tech industry. Using Giddens' structuration theory and Kroeger's take on facework as a guiding lens, we try to understand whether T&S can serve as a bridge between platform logic and public interest, between self-regulation and state regulation, harm mitigation and accountability. We are drawing on insights from semi-structured interviews with T&S professionals and arrive at two main observations. First, institutional "facework" is largely absent in practice. T&S staff lack the visibility, resources, and authority to enact their role meaningfully. Second, many companies are deprioritizing T&S. If taken seriously, however, T&S must be embedded with product design, business models, and institutional accountability. If the focus of these departments becomes performative legal compliance and the outsourcing of activities to offshore locations and machines, an opportunity to protect users and a democratic discourse may be lost.