Trust & Safety Tycoon: Try Your Hand At Managing A Social Media Trust & Safety Team
from the how-good-are-you-at-trust-&-safety? dept
Play Trust & Safety Tycoon in your browser on desktop or mobile »
Today we’re super excited to launch Trust & Safety Tycoon, a video game simulating what it’s like to run a trust & safety team at a fictitious, rapidly scaling social media company called Yapper*. If you’ve ever wanted to see how you’d do as the head of trust & safety, now is your chance.
Over the last few years we’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to educate people on the concept of “trust & safety” at an internet platform, as it’s something that many people have strong opinions about, but very little direct experience with themselves. It’s why we ran the content moderation case study series for a while. It’s why we’ve written thousands of articles about content moderation and trust & safety here on Techdirt. And it’s why earlier this year, we created the Moderator Mayhem mobile game, to give people a taste of what’s it’s like to be a front line content moderator.
And now we’re launching Trust & Safety Tycoon. This browser-based game (which works on both mobile and desktop browsers) is a different kind of trust & safety simulator from the last game. While that game was about being a front line content moderator, this game is about actually running a trust & safety team for a rapidly scaling social media startup. You have to set policies, deal with various dilemmas, face internal and external pressures, weigh tradeoffs, determine resource allocation and more, all while trying to keep your website from descending into a cesspit of hate, driving away users and advertisers.
As with Moderator Mayhem, our goal with Trust & Safety Tycoon is to help more people better understand the kinds of dilemmas, nuances, and challenges of handling trust & safety these days. Too many people have very strong feelings about how it should work, despite having little experience in how things actually work.
Trust & Safety Tycoon gives people a chance to try out their own ideas on how to manage a trust & safety program at a startup and see how well it works. There is no “right” answer with any of this, but not all decisions will lead to positive outcomes for you, or the company you’re working for. How will you handle concerns from your team, the CEO, or the media? How will you handle a crisis when your team is already overwhelmed? Will you cause an international incident that gets you called to answer questions from Congress?
This game was developed with support from the Hewlett Foundation, and in association with the Atlantic Council’s recent Taskforce for a Trustworthy Future Web, which we spoke about earlier this year when its report on scaling trust came out. If you didn’t want to read that (excellent) 150 page report, think of this game as a somewhat more fun way of thinking through many of the same ideas.
The Director of the Democracy & Tech initiative at the Atlantic Council, Rose Jackson, told us, “As more people tune into questions around online harms, tech company decisionmaking, and how to keep the internet safe, this game is an invaluable resource to help people understand the tradeoffs at play. Anyone who cares about what they see online will benefit from this fun and thought-provoking experience.”
“We’re excited to support this innovative approach to helping people understand the hard trade-offs involved in trust and safety—not just content moderation, but also building tools, running global operations, and finding the diverse group of talented people needed to do all these things” said Eli Sugarman, director of the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. “Mike Masnick and his team, and the group of experts who advised them, have done a great job of creating a fun and engaging game about the challenges involved in keeping people safe online.”
As with our previous games, this game was a collaboration between our Copia Gaming effort and Randy Lubin at Leveraged Play.
* Any similarities to any real social media companies are purely coincidental entirely on purpose.
Play Trust & Safety Tycoon in your browser on desktop or mobile »
Filed Under: content moderation, trust & safety, trust & safety tycoon
Comments on “Trust & Safety Tycoon: Try Your Hand At Managing A Social Media Trust & Safety Team”
Oh wow, this just seems designed for pain, like a home tooth extraction kit.
I’ve lost with a 203 score… I’m not ready to be the next Yapper CEO… but it should be enough to apply as next Twitter CEO.
By the way, good game, maybe too much text (the game doesn’t seem enough “real-time” after spending 10s reading the question before making the next choice) but it gives decent a glimpse of the different factors (ad, growth, moderation and… morale ? what’s that ?) and that managing a social network, with limited budget, is not any easy task (no wonder why some of theses current managers are so desperate lately).
You haven’t had any brand issue by ending your game name with “Tycoon” ?
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I similarly assumed that there would probably be issues but, when we looked into it, it turned out there are no trademark issues around “tycoon” and it’s used generically as a genre descriptor in the names of lots of games by different companies
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Wow, I honestly thought that “tycoon” was trademark-able (and to be honest, if it were trademarked by the first company to make a tycoon game, they’d have a good case both legally and morally!), but I’m glad to see it’s as free as “Taco Tuesday”!
Wow, sounds fascinating. There goes my weekend!
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Found a bug; banning bronies does not immediately set conversation health to max.
This is unfairly worded. A more accurate real world statement would be:
And if there are not some cases like that in the game, it probably isn’t as accurate as one might hope.
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You should perhaps try playing it…
I’m pretty sure a certain billionaire (at least for now) finally realized he’s in way over his head and reached out to you to give him a hand to figure this shit out – in a way that doesn’t expose him as needing anyone’s help.
It was tough. Took me a few tries to even get out of Year 2 lol. At the end of my last try, I left the company to advise the US government on its tech policy or something. Final score was around 1966ish, four stars (the score, not the game). For the game, I’d give it 4.5 stars out of 5. It’s a little too wordy, but I’m nitpicking.
Fun game
I enjoyed it. Ended my first run with a score of 1882 by focusing on the users within the framework of the law (except for Texas and Pakistan, who weirdly asked for essentially the same things but that never happens in real life).
WarGames
Seems the only winning move not to play.
I played the game once and have to play it a few more times to explore the different options. Two observations:
* Most questions clearly have right and wrong answers as the game is very opinionated about how moderation should be done. I wish it were more open-ended.
* A primary goal is to increase advertising revenue. I suppose there’s no inherent problem with a game’s goal being detached from what’s good in the real world but given the first bullet point, the game does seem to be moralizing. And what advertisers want isn’t really always morally the right thing to do. In fact, if advertisers had their way, platforms would be Disneyfied. On the other hand I suppose the game has no choice but to include ad revenue because it’s majorly affected by moderation decisions.
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This closely aligns with multiple real world scenarios I’ve witnessed; the problem is when those dictating the way profit at the company is to be managed are not doing so in cooperation with the head of Trust & Safety. Leading T&S tends to be like leading Data Security or the compliance team — what you do only matters to the decision makers when Things Go Wrong.
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As someone who has moderated imageboards in the past: From a proportional standpoint, moderation really doesn’t offer many “shades of grey” situations unless your rules are written so vaguely that such situations keep coming up. Attempting to follow the law creates more edge cases than bog-standard moderation efforts ever will.
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Yeah man, you are DEFINITELY the sort of person handing out bans for “hate speech” — by which you just mean someone disagreeing with your politics.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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This… simply isn’t true. I’m not sure what gives off that impression.
This is also… not true. It is in your dashboard, but it is hardly a “primary goal.” Indeed, there are only a very small number of times where ad revenue is an issue in the game, but we include it in your dashboard, because it is something that people at various companies told us is always on their minds at a startup, because they know that keeping the company alive is something that is always being monitored in the background to some extent, and we wanted the game to be realistic.
Fun little game. Nothing new for me after reading TD for only a year… and 10 years moderating chats / forums of various sizes. “Won” after a few tries figuring out resource management with a score of 1882. Quotation marks because… Well… We all know there’s no winning this game, it’s about endlessly dealing with the worst humanity throws at the internet.
I figured it’d start of sort of like moderator mayhem, but then half my team would be laid off, followed by funding cuts for the rest of my team, followed by me being hauled before congress to explain while I’m also the only surviving employee able to make actionable changes (which I can’t make because I’m tied up with Congress)….
This game is an extraordinary Enshittifiation Simulator.
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Was going to try it out, but then realized I was being forced to play as a BIPOC woman, when I’m a Caucasian biological male. No thanks.
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Those, like you, who never try to imagine how other people feel and function lack empathy. You have my sympathy for being so emotionally stunted.
Wow, this game completely proves everything Mike has been saying about moderation for ages! What a strange and illuminating coincidence