Moran, R. E., Schafer, J., Bayar, M., & Starbird, K. (2025). The end of trust and safety?: Examining the future of content moderation and upheavals in professional online safety efforts. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713662
Summary
This paper investigates the destabilization of trust and safety (T&S) as a professional field — the domain of content moderation and online safety work carried out at technology platforms. Drawing on qualitative interviews with practitioners, the authors document how a confluence of political pressure, corporate layoffs, and shifting platform priorities has thrown the field into crisis. The central argument is that T&S, understood as an emergent profession rather than merely a platform function, is being eroded in ways that carry real consequences for the future of content moderation and the broader project of maintaining safer online spaces.
Key Contributions
- Provides an empirical, practitioner-grounded account of the contemporary crisis in trust and safety as a professional field.
- Documents insider perspectives on industry-wide changes reshaping content moderation.
- Frames T&S as a profession worthy of study in its own right, drawing on the sociology of professional work rather than treating it purely as a technical or corporate activity.
Methods
Qualitative, interview-based research with trust and safety professionals, complemented by analysis of contemporary shifts in the T&S industry and platform practices. The practitioner interviews anchor the study’s claims about how the field is experienced from within.
Findings
- Practitioners report widespread destabilization through layoffs, restructuring, and changing organizational mandates.
- External political pressure and shifts in platform leadership priorities are identified as key drivers of the retrenchment in online safety work.
- The professional infrastructure supporting content moderation is being hollowed out in ways likely to degrade platform safety outcomes.
Connections
This paper sits within content moderation and platform governance debates, offering a practitioner-side account of institutional retreat from safety work. It complements structural and policy-oriented analyses of platform governance and data access such as Rieder2026-pp and Rieder2025-ju, and connects to broader concerns about the erosion of infrastructures for studying and countering online harms found in Donovan2025-ws and Bak-Coleman2026-mk.