Important And Needed New Report: Scaling Trust On The Web
from the we-need-more-trust dept
We talk a lot about the concept of “trust & safety” at internet companies, but the entire concept is relatively new, and still very confusing to many, including some who work in the field!
Over the last few years we’ve seen a growing movement to organize and somewhat “professionalize” the space, with very important and useful new organizations like the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA) and the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, both of which are filling in important gaps and helping to make “trust & safety” a much clearer concept and profession.
But, still, there is plenty of confusion, especially for those with no experience at all, who (extremely incorrectly) think “trust & safety” is a euphemism for “censors” or something similar. In fact, the trust & safety role springs naturally from people trying to do exactly what the name says: make sure a web service is trustworthy and safe for users. Usually, this starts with dealing with spam, but quickly picks up on other areas of problematic content around abuse, harassment, child sexual abuse material, and copyright infringement.
In part because this space is somewhat new and only just forming as a concept, it was exciting to be a part of a task force, organized by the Atlantic Council, over the last few months to explore what it means to create a trustworthy future web. The task force brought together a wide variety of experts studying all different aspects of the trust & safety world, from industry, academia, the media, civil society and more.
On Wednesday, the task force released the output of the effort, a thorough paper: Scaling Trust on the Web. The full document clocks in at 150 pages, but the main report is really just the first 50 or so pages, with six annexes included that explore different specific areas, including things like building better tooling for trust and safety, exploring the gaming ecosystem in particular, and looking at trust & safety in a federated world (we just had a podcast on this topic).
There’s also an annex on “respecting children as rights holders,” which does an important job of flipping the terrible current narrative that seems to ignore that children have rights themselves regarding the use of the internet, while various politicians, often egged on by the media, keep pushing to take away the rights of kids to make use of the internet.
There’s a lot in the report, but I think it’s an important step forward for those who are actually looking to understand not just the concept of “trust & safety,” but literally what it means to build a “trustworthy” web that enables so much of the good things that made all of us excited to use the web in the first place. And given just how many hysterical, hyperbolic reports we’ve seen lately about the web being horrible or whatever, it’s nice to have a careful, thoughtful, forward-looking report that is grounded in reality.
A big shoutout and kudos goes to Kat Duffy at the Atlantic Council who wrangled this project, bringing together dozens of very opinionated experts, sometimes with very different views, and pulling together such a massive and detailed report. And, similarly, kudos to Eli Sugarman who similarly helped pull all this together and made it possible via the Hewlett Foundation and Schmidt Futures.
For what it’s worth, my role in all of this was to attend a few meetings where I expressed a bunch of thoughts, as well as reviewing some early drafts and providing a few comments as this went through the sausage making process. I was told from the beginning that I was never expected to sign off on the end product or even agree with anything in it, which was key to me participating in the first place (especially as I’ve seen a few other attempts at something somewhat similar go completely off the rails). But I’m quite happy with how this turned out and think this will be an incredibly useful document going forward in continuing to make the kind of web that we all should want.
I hope that people who are legitimately interested in how the web should operate will read through the report to get a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges ahead.
Finally, I will note that I’ve been diligently working on another project related to this release, but it’s not quite ready for the light of day just yet, so stay tuned…
Filed Under: trust & safety, trustworthy web
Comments on “Important And Needed New Report: Scaling Trust On The Web”
What if we took away
the Idea that Advertising is Worth Money?
We could take away trackers, and Location info, as well as the chance of 3rd party Virus, bots, And a few other things.
Industry: Huge is trust and safety, but on the LOW end is Child safety Civil rights, and Venture capital?
Academia: Top is Child safety and GLOBAL majority, on the END is trust and safety, Human rights, Civil rights.
Civil Soc.: Top is Human rights, Global Majority and the END? Child safety, Civil rights, and Legal.
Strange.
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"...and copyright infringement."
This thing is not the same as the others,yet the fascist USA keeps pretending it is.
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Re:
Given that I already implemented the safety and trust features to meshpage.org, you can feel safe when browsing our lowly web page: https, certificates, login systems, paywalls, adverticing popups, EU cookie popups have been correctly implemented.
Re: Re:
The trust and safety issue with meshpages is you, nobody trusts you to be anything but a troll.
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Re: Re: Re:
Internet just comes kinda late to this trust and safety party. It’s no wonder you’re late in understanding how the trust is built, if you didn’t yourself start the activity 5 years ago, but instead you’re following media organisation’s timeline for introducing the concvepts to you? And once you learn about the concept, it still takes several years to adopt it. Basically, you’re soon 10 years late in the activity, and that means you can be trusted alot less than the trolls on techdirt.
Re: Re: Re:
So when you can’t find anything wrong from the software product offered, your blame arrow turns to finding errors from humans, and blaming humans for imaginary failures in the marketplace for products that have not even been properly released to the public.
I’m not offering my ass for sale, mind you. Your critique would be valid, if I was some trans cocksucker that sold access to the human body to large masses of horny internet users. But that’s not the pitch we’re running with. We’re selling software only, and you can find your horny services from some other place.
For software, check https://meshpage.org/article.php and try not to choke on your coffee for laughter. If you’re looking for some kind of human properties that communicate stability or confidence, you need to contact your management track contact persons. We’re not correct contact persons for that situation.
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Censor professional associations!
The word “censor” itself is almost 2800 years old, and the concept far older than tha, at least as old as the first cities. Rulers want to control, and the powerful nearly immediately realized in the name of banning “decency”, now “Hate speech” and “misnformation” they could simply quash dissent, literally make disagreeing with them illegal. It’s why the 1A exists and also why the FBI and CDC worked so hard to get around it.
It’s not confusion, it’s exactly that. I often accuse you of gaslighting but you realize this is a classic example of gaslighting verbiage? “Oh no honey, you didn’t see me at the theater with another woman, you’re just confused!”
I understand you very much would like it not to be called censorship, but it is exactly censorship and illiberal af.
To reiterate, saying “in fact” does not actually make it fact. These boards spring naturally from the desire to control what others say and villainize anyone who disagrees with you.
Now I understand just why you fawned so much over Gadde and are so pissed Musk bought twitter (directly in opposition of principals you voiced 15-20 years ago)….you want to be at the center of what you see as a growth industry!!.
I suspect very much by the recent outrage over these things that you will turn out to be wrong on that, but should you not be, it’ll be getting all 1776 very soon.