Stanford Trust & Safety Teaching Consortium

The idea

It started as an idea under stellar palm trees during the inaugural Trust & Safety Research Conference at Stanford University last year and became a wonderful and inspiring group of professionals from academia, industry, and non-profits. 

With the leadership of Shelby Grossman and Alex Stamos, the Stanford Trust & Safety Teaching Consortium at the Cyber Policy Center, a joint initiative of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Law School,  was established. For the past 8 months, we worked on the very first open source syllabus on trust & safety with one goal: Help make the internet a safer place for everyone. 

About the teaching materials

The open source syllabus launched with 13 modules accessible for everyone who prepares the next generation of trust and safety professionals from engineering and PMs to policy, legal and regulation. 

The modules cover the regulatory framework where trust & safety operates in, hands-on topics like trust & safety metrics, deep dives into threat vectors like harassment and hate speech, sexual exploitation, self-harm, what role emerging technologies play in trust & safety and strategic adversarial behavior such as platform manipulation and impersonation.

Together with Lee Forster, I worked on the module  “Authenticity, identity, and platform manipulation” which was supposed to also be about the importance of account authentication to prevent abuse - a topic I hope to provide some input to in the future. Take a look and let me know what you think!

A rewarding couple of months

The work on the Stanford Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium was genuinely rewarding. It was the opportunity to sync and discuss the most important challenges for trust & safety, build very real output together and share knowledge and insights about what I’ve been seeing over the past 7 years building technology for the industry. 

Thanks to Shelby and Alex for their leadership during this entire process and all of the work it takes to get things done and create real and valuable output with a loosely organized group of industry folks and researchers.