2. The First Line of Defense
Trust and Safety professionals are highly skilled at working under pressure and in challenging conditions. Like first responders in other urgent situations, T&S professionals need the resources and support to stay in the work for the long haul.
Trust and Safety professionals are recruited for their passion, empathy, expertise and contextual knowledge. In an industry that significantly drives the economy, and celebrates the stereotype of the computer nerd – fantastically smart but not great with people skills – T&S professionals can be seen as the heart and conscience inside companies.
“People who do this work and do it well are very passionate about not only safety, but also ethics and human rights. It’s a much different mindset than many other teams have. There is a fiery drive to make the world better.”
- Interviewee
Trust and Safety professionals need to have strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills, and be flexible, curious, empathetic, and resilient. All these skills and qualities are used in the design of community guidelines, automation to recognize harmful activity, and responses to user reports. One interviewee said that professionals need to be familiar with and be able to understand the dark side of human nature.
T&S professionals also need to be able to understand complexity and context. Context means taking into account the circumstances in which content is created or in which someone engages in certain behaviors, or as one interviewee put it: “all of the different ways people communicate, all the nuances and language and region.”
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