Massive layoffs across the tech sector have hit trust and safety teams hard over the past year. But with wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and more than 50 elections taking place in the next 12 months, experts worry that a nascent industry of startups created to keep people safe online won’t be able to cope.
The cuts made headlines a year ago, when X (then Twitter) fired 3,700 people—including hundreds in trust and safety roles. Since then, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon have made similar cuts. The layoffs at X inspired other platforms to do the same, argues Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, founding director at tech policy think tank the Tech Global Institute and a former member of Meta’s policy team. “In many ways, Twitter got away with it,” she says. “That’s given the other companies the confidence to say, ‘You know what? It’s OK. You can survive and not face a terrible consequence.’”
Still, the cost of these cuts is arguably already evident in the way major platforms have scrambled to respond to the war between Israel and Hamas. And the shift away from in-house trust and safety teams has created an opening for consultancies and startups to offer something new: trust and safety as a service.
These companies, many of them founded and staffed by people with Big Tech pedigrees, let platforms “buy rather than build” trust and safety services, says Talha Baig, a former Meta engineer whose startup, Sero AI, recently received backing from accelerator Y Combinator. “There is a lot more labor out on the marketplace, and there’s also a lot more customers willing to buy that labor.”
But experts warn that outsourcing trust and safety also means outsourcing responsibilities to teams with no power to change the way platforms actually work.
Sahar Massachi, a former member of Meta’s civic integrity team and cofounder and executive director of the Integrity Institute think tank, worries that by outsourcing key functions, platforms may be undermining their ability to improve products. Trust and safety issues can sometimes be more about product design than active moderation—should a user be able to reshare content? How much weight should different metrics be given within a recommendation algorithm? “The vendors could be great, but they won’t be able to have insight into that because of the ways that companies work,” Massachi says.
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