Keep doing hard things - a pep talk for trust and safety workers

Plus, the Integrity Institute launches the second part of its Election Integrity Best Practices Guide.

A week and a half ago, someone on the Integrity Institute Slack wrote that she was working on her pep talks to her team with election prep heating up. She wanted to know stories of when people considered quitting but didn’t and what keeps them going.

This was before we learned that four Twitter employees in Dublin working on election integrity had been fired, with Elon accusing them of undermining election integrity. Before the former Twitter head of safety, Yoel Roth, was on stage at the Code conference talking about the death threats he’s faced from doing this work and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, in an interview after him, seemingly not having a clue about many things - including how to protect elections.

Programming note: I have an interview with Yoel on tomorrow’s podcast!

Add to that the chilling effects of the legal attacks against information integrity researchers and people like Yoel being yelled at for hours by Congress. Not to mention all the layoffs across the tech industry and the constant questions if platforms are “doing enough.”

It’s no wonder managers are worried about their teams burning out and leaving the profession. And this is 13 months before the U.S. election. 

Earlier this year, I wrote an open letter to all the people working at platforms big and small, new and old, who are trying to figure out the new rules of the road as they build the next generation of platforms from someone who has gone through a version of that. I gave some tips to consider as they navigated these waters. 

Today, I want to explain why this work is important and why you should do it. If you aren’t a trust and safety employee or someone at a tech company, still read this to learn why you should support it.

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So, I won’t lie. After I wrote the words “why you should support it,” I got massive writer's block. The cursor just sat there for at least an hour, mocking me. I had no idea where to start. Should I talk about how doing this work is like skydiving (scary to jump out of the plane but exhilarating once you do); or maybe it’s more like trail-less hiking in Alaska where the mountain you are going to climb looks a lot closer than it really is and you have a lot of obstacles like creeks, brush patches and bears to navigate; or maybe I should tell the story about how I didn’t want to build ad transparency tools at first.

None of them seem right.

Because the truth is that being in the trust and safety space means constantly blazing a new path. Many problems aren’t new - hell, many existed before the internet, but their contours constantly change. 

And it’s not just making a new path; it’s doing so while everything is on fire all around you. 

It’s a special kind of person that runs into the fire. 

It’s the person who is not afraid of nuance and complication. Who understands there are no clear answers. 

They don’t know how to extinguish the fires, but they will just start trying things. If they are solo, they’ll do what they can and work to get others to show up. As more come, they’ll work as a team - because that’s stronger than doing it alone.

It’s one of my favorite things about the tech world. We just start doing it and figure it out as we go along. I know that drives many other people crazy, but sometimes, I think it can be worse to be paralyzed with fear.

The trust and safety field existed well before 2016, but it did change the day after the U.S. election. 

I’ll never forget the feeling of realizing there wasn’t anyone to turn to about what steps we needed to take to fix the problems on the platform. There wasn’t a playbook - we would need to figure it out as we went along.

The more we started digging, the more we realized how much we needed to do. It was daunting. Full of land mines that we keep finding today. Hard tradeoffs between safety and speech. External pressure from Congress, the government, the media, and everyone was relentless. It hasn’t let up.

And now, trust and safety workers have faced layoffs and their own CEOs attacking them. 

No, it is not an easy time to be a trust and safety worker.

But it’s never been a more important time to be one.

2024 is a mountain unlike any we’ve ever had to climb before. Sure, you might be able to pull from some of the old playbooks, but in all likelihood, you’ll be building from scratch.

You won’t know until many years down the road if the things you do today will have a positive or negative impact. The butterfly effect is real in trust and safety.

I look back now at the political and issue ad transparency tools we built at Facebook starting in 2017. The company still has more robust global coverage and tools than any other platform. Many have copied from our work. There’s more insight into how campaigns run ads online. 

You know something is a hard decision when it keeps getting revisited every few years. Platforms are all over the place for political ads, but there’s no doubt that our early work helped pave the way for others. We didn’t know if that would be the case when we started.

One of the points Steve Jobs made in his commencement address is that “you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.” He says you must trust that the dots will connect down the road and follow your heart, even when that path is not well-worn and hard.

Trust that your work matters - even if it doesn’t feel like it does today.

Trust and safety is a passion. I knew I loved this work when it was taken away from me in late 2019. When I got pulled off of elections, I was devastated. I felt like I was a failure. But, there was a clarifying moment for me when someone asked me why I didn’t just give up elections and work on a different policy area. I physically recoiled at the thought - elections were my jam. And then I thought about it more. I meditated. And I realized how much I truly love this work. So much so that it is worth jumping into the shark-infested waters to stay involved. I wasn’t at a platform anymore, but I would still find a way to contribute.

The trust and safety profession is at a crossroads right now. Some of you are looking for new jobs after being laid off. Some of you are at a newer platform that doesn’t have all the resources of a legacy platform. Some of you have been at this for years at places like Meta, Google, and Microsoft.

Don’t give up. To quote Glennon Doyle, “We can do hard things.” We can keep doing hard things.

I can promise you that it will test your limits in every way. Go back and read my piece with tips on how to deal with those. Rule number one is: Take care of yourself. This includes taking steps to protect your identity online. Talk to your company about what protections they provide. Look at tools like Tall Poppy or DeleteMe. Set up a Google alert for yourself. Make a plan with your family - for instance; I have a code phrase with my family should they get any message or phone call of me in supposed distress. They need to ask me for that before they believe it’s me on the other end. But do this now. Don’t wait for something to happen.

Moreover, I can guarantee things will go wrong and that people will find fault with your actions.

But I can also promise that not only will you come out of it stronger, but you’ll have made democracy stronger as well. You never know what the impact of a single flap from a butterfly’s wings will have. 

So, jump out of that plane. It feels scary, but I promise it will be worth it. 

PS: I came across this poem on Instagram recently, and I thought it captured what I’m trying to say well. 

PPS: I mentioned Glennon Doyle above, and I recommend her book Untamed. This is one of my favorite passages. 

Integrity Institute Releases New Guide That Provides Concrete Elections Integrity Recommendations for Online Platforms

Today, the Integrity Institute is proud to launch a second elections integrity best practices guide on “Defining and Achieving Success in Elections Integrity.” This latest guide provides companies – large or small, established or new-on-the-block – deeper and more targeted explorations on metrics and goal-setting, so that they could leverage technological and other tools to build on and ensure the success of their elections integrity programs.

Expanding upon the overview for online companies on starting an elections integrity program in the first guide, this second guide provides concrete details for companies as they fully implement an elections integrity program. These details include:

• Setting specific goals, defining success, and measuring and monitoring with metrics;

• A typology and examples of product design considerations and interventions;

• Working with external parties for various purposes and in various contexts;

• Discussions of critical topics, including how new generative AI may impact elections, various types of potentially abusive actors, and more.

I hope you find this helpful!

Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.