Online Trust & Safety

What rules and expectations should online platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Uber use to govern themselves? How do technology companies work to mitigate socio-technical harms arising from their products? How do geopolitical questions and conflicts manifest on online platforms—for instance, how should social media platforms handle gruesome images and unverified information emerging from the war in Ukraine? One discipline is at the core of these questions: Trust & Safety, which is the study of how online services are abused and/or cause societal and individual harms, and the potential responses to mitigate these harms.

Still relatively obscure but of increasing centrality to almost every matter of public importance that has an online component, the Trust and Safety field has exploded in the last two decades to encompass areas of policies ranging from online violent extremism to child safety and disinformation. This course provides students with the foundational knowledge to understand the key methods, approaches and underlying technologies in T&S and content moderation, and to navigate the current debates in the field. Over seven sessions, students will engage with essential academic texts on content moderation, disinformation, online harms and the regulation of technology. They will also learn from practitioners, getting an unique and valuable perspective on how to build and operate content moderation systems, and on how to detect information operations unfolding in social networks. This course engages deeply with the merits and flaws of current systems to address socio-technical harms within the technology sector, and prepares students to operate, regulate or cover these issues in their careers.

This is an accelerated, seven- session course, aiming to rapidly give students familiarity and sophistication with the field and topics of Trust & Safety and its fundamental dynamics.