Trust & Safety Summit 2025: A Desire to do the Right Thing in a Sector Defying its Challenges

Professionals from across the world gathered at the second annual Trust & Safety Summit, the first event of its kind in the UK, which took place on 25 and 26 March in London, to share insights on the latest trends in the rapidly evolving field of online trust and safety. Industry leaders, regulators and other experts shared panels and made presentations on diverse topics such as safety by design in product development, leveraging AI as a tool in creating robust safety ecosystems and the need for a global regulatory alignment, among others. 

Our highlight from the opening day saw our Director of The Internet Commission, Andrea Evans-Bilham, moderate a regulatory compliance and preparedness panel with the participation of Holly Shepherdson (SoundCloud), Pearlé Nwaezeigwe (former Oversight Board member), and Agustina Callegari (World Economic Forum). Panellists explored strategies for aligning compliance teams to ensure readiness for new laws, requirements and standards to tackle cross-border data governance and ensure consistency in platform safety and enforcement while maintaining a level of flexibility. They also pointed out to some of the current challenges and called for new frameworks facilitating working relationships between regulators and the industry to enhance efficiency of the emerging legislation.

In other sessions, company representatives explained their approaches to risk assessment, stressed the need for harmonisation of regulatory requirements across jurisdictions and shared principles that go beyond regulation. They also pointed out the need to agree on consistent quality control tools for performance evaluation and to build multistakeholder frameworks to address local cultural and regulatory nuances as an integral part of policy and guideline building processes. The trust and safety sector faces various challenges, including limited resources for its teams, despite the general agreement that these two elements ought to be an integral part of product design and development. Rather than a mere cost centre, T&S is a structural investment in guaranteeing quality user interaction and overall business sustainability.

As announced by one of the regulators present at the Summit, the era of self-regulation is over. Governments across the world are here with new rules, and they are here to stay. In response to this, cross industry collaboration and knowledge sharing are growing in importance, while industry professionals agree that mere compliance is just an unavoidable baseline – a sort of a seatbelt on the things we value. More effort and resources, however, need to be put into devising shared principles to make the lives of trust and safety professionals easier and their tools more effective.

The investment into trust and safety as an integral part of product design rooted in adopting a pro-active rather than reactive approach in content moderation and online harm resolution is the only way for futureproofing against emerging threats. Many participants agreed that there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to this, as the challenges vary in nature, scope and frequency and often require nuance and innovation to be tackled. Even though recent advancements in technology such as AI have been widely used to scale various elements in the overall harm prevention and trust & safety product architecture, there was an overarching agreement that the human element in moderation is still indispensable, and moderators’ well-being requires attention and safeguarding.

Non-governmental organisations can help the industry grow by aligning on regulations, improving risk assessment, and creating resource-saving strategies that can be widely adopted.

Trust Alliance Group (TAG), through The Internet Commission, is aiming to become a trusted partner in this field. TAG's independence and long-standing regulatory experience, along with The Internet Commission's digital research and leadership, create a unique platform to improve the digital ecosystem and ensure safer online experiences globally.