Content Moderation

Trust and safety workers on why they're not speaking out

What readers say I got wrong in our last edition

Casey Newton

Jul 28, 2025 — 12 min read

(Ernie A. Stephens / Unsplash)

On Thursday I wrote about my visit to TrustCon, where a feeling I have been having all year crystallized: that despite an unprecedented siege on their profession, trust and safety leaders have been remarkably quiet. I asked why, as far as I could tell, no leader in the field had quit their job in protest of policy reversals on hate speech, misinformation, and other issues and talked about it publicly. I described a shift in the field's priorities from human rights-centered practices to a more pragmatic compliance regime. I argued that, whatever the causes for that silence, it looked to the outside world like surrender.

The piece generated more responses than almost any other edition of Platformer. In the days since, I've sifted through dozens of your messages, reached out to many of you to hear more, and added lots of nuance to my own understanding of trust and safety work in 2025.

More notable than the sheer volume of messages, at least to me, is how polarizing the column turned out to be. Many of you wrote to me in agreement, and thanked me for engaging with the subject. "I agree with every word," a former Meta employee wrote.

Matheus Bevilacqua, who worked on trust and safety teams at Uber and Zoom, said the shift I had described is real. "I think trust and safety used to be about creating space for authentic expression, building systems that allowed users to connect without fear or harm," they said. "Now, that vision has been hollowed out and replaced by a cold, compliance-driven approach. The work has shifted from meaningfully protecting people to ticking legal checkboxes and racing to 'win' the AI market. The industry used to ask, 'How can we prevent harm and empower people?' Today, the question is often just, 'What’s the minimum we need to do to avoid fines or regulatory action?'”

Others were quite angry. "All you accomplished here was pissing all over the afterglow of one of the few opportunities for fellowship a very besieged and downtrodden group of people have in the entire year, in what is already the single most difficult year in the history of the field," one TrustCon attendee wrote.

Some readers objected to my tone. "It seems unnecessarily adversarial," wrote Alice Goguen Hunsberger, head of trust and safety at Musubi, on LinkedIn. "This is exactly why T&S people often feel unsafe talking to press. We’re painted as 'failures' even when we are doing so much."

For the record, I don't consider anyone I've written about in this context a failure. To the contrary, ever since I began writing about them frequently in 2019, content moderators have been my heroes. At the same time, I did want to challenge leaders in the industry to consider the consequences of not speaking out — even if they have very good reasons for remaining quiet.

Still, many of you said I gave short shrift to many of the practical and even philosophical reasons that trust and safety leaders have not been speaking out. And so today, in the spirit of healthy debate, I wanted to yield the floor to these readers.

Here, according to you, are the big things I missed.

To criticize rank-and-file trust and safety workers is to criticize the wrong people. A common view in responses is that the true blame for platforms' retrenchment on human rights issues lies with the C-suite and other top executives. To criticize their subordinates is misguided, some readers said. "The people at TrustCon want to speak, want to push forward, want to make things better," a former trust and safety worker at a big platform wrote. "But they're the cogs. They can't always speak, they can't always make the change loudly. Please don't criticize them, and please don't use TrustCon as a way to punch up, because honestly it's just punching down."

It's not just that workers fear for their jobs if they speak out — it's that they fear no one else will hire them if they do. I wrote in my original piece that workers are afraid they will be fired if they speak out against platforms' reversals on hate speech and other issues. The larger issue may be that the industry is contracting overall, leaving workers with fewer options — particularly given that Meta, Google, X, and other platforms all largely aligned on crafting speech policies that would appease the Trump administration.

Many trust and safety workers believe speaking out won't have any practical effect. This one pained me to hear, since journalism is rooted in the idea that galvanizing public attention can lead to positive change. But multiple readers told me they believe that they simply do not have the leverage to change their companies' positions.

Others made a related point — that to the extent trust and safety is effective today, it is largely because workers don't make their case to the press.

"Like you, I’m disappointed by the lack of public conversation about the rollback in online safety policies, and gutting of safety teams across the industry," said Chris Roberts, a trust and safety leader who wrote to me in his personal capacity. "But I think it’s a mistake to expect T&S professionals to serve primarily as public advocates. Our work is — and can only be successful — behind the scenes. Writing enforcement guidance, interpreting policy edge cases, and advocating internally for user safety, within the constraints of the current political climate. The work isn't idealistic or public — it's pragmatic and behind the scenes."

People are scared. I mentioned in my original piece that trust and safety workers often receive threats for the work they do. But several readers thought I had under-weighted both how scared workers are, and how justified those fears are, given the stakes. Multiple readers brought up the terrifying harassment that Yoel Roth faced after quitting his job as head and trust and safety at Twitter.

"There are literally websites dedicated to doxing people who speak out about specific issues, and then those databases then get used by departments like ICE to target people with the full force of the US government," one reader wrote. "There's a huge impact on individuals who speak out. And that is the case under any kind of fascist regime, but my takeaway from your piece was that it punched down at the very people who ARE trying to have these discussions and do something about them."

European tech regulation is better than I seemed to give it credit for. In my original piece, I wrote that one of the primary forces in trust and safety's shift away from a more idealistic, human rights-centered approach is the European Union's Digital Services Act. The law's transparency and safety requirements are beneficial, I wrote, but encouraged platforms to think about trust and safety as a more mundane compliance operation.

One trust and safety worker at a large platform told me that this state of affairs is far preferable to the alternative.

"I'd be way back in the long line of DSA defenders, but what it does do, and what it requires the platforms to do, is raise the floor," they wrote. "It does not serve to lower the ceiling. If the time comes where market conditions again appear to suggest that robust T&S enforcement serves as a competitive advantage, and political winds turn sufficiently, we'll both be able to watch in real time as T&S teams are resourced, reinforced, and renewed. The idealism you eulogize did not work. Full stop. Idealism tempered by pragmatism, enforced by the power of the state? At least something gets done."

I'm grateful to all the readers who wrote in to share their thoughts. And I'm grateful to everyone who continues to work in trust in safety despite the internal turmoil, the external threats, and the occasional obnoxious column in the press. I cover these issues because, like trust and safety workers, I believe that human rights should extend to online spaces. And it's a cruel irony that platforms rolled back protections for their users this year in the name of free expression, while at the same time their own workforces (credibly!) fear reprisals from the US government simply for discussing their work.

And they have lots of company. Academics, nonprofits, and journalists — all historical allies of trust and safety work — are now also facing censorship attacks from House Republicans and the Trump Administration. The cost of speaking out keeps going up. And before long, trust and safety workers may not be the only voices in civil society that are suddenly conspicuous by their absence.

Elsewhere in chilled speech: A look at how liberal nonprofit Media Matters is struggling as it faces a barrage of lawsuits by Elon Musk, along with investigations by Trump’s FTC and Republican state attorneys general, over its constitutionally protected political speech. (Kenneth P. Vogel, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac / New York Times)

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