Moderation, policy, anti-abuse.
Trust & Safety used to mean a 'mute' button in the chat client. Then players started killing themselves over harassment. Then governments started writing laws (DSA in Europe, KOSA in the US). Then advertisers and platform holders started auditing your moderation. Now T&S is the difference between a game that grows and one that's pulled from app stores.
The discipline covers three things that used to live in three different orgs: real-time moderation (in-game chat, voice, UGC), policy work (terms of service, age gating, behavioral expectations), and crisis response (the discord raid, the doxxing incident, the regulatory letter). The best T&S teams have one strategic owner across all three.
“Trust & Safety isn't a cost center. It's the platform that lets everything else stand up.”
If you're targeting under-18s, you don't have a choice — KOSA, COPPA, the UK Age-Appropriate Design Code all carry real teeth now. If you're shipping in voice, the moderation problem is 10× harder and 100× more expensive. Studios that didn't take this seriously two years ago are scrambling now.
Each bar is a topic in this pillar. Bar length is content volume — how much we've published about it. Tap any topic to drill in.
Riot's behavioral team pioneered the Tribunal (player-juried punishment), then ML-driven detection that catches toxic behavior before reports come in. They publish quarterly transparency reports. T&S is treated as a publishable competitive advantage.
↳ Transparency on what you punish — and what you don't — turns moderation from a black box into a trust signal.
Built one of the largest T&S operations in any tech company, period — thousands of moderators, ML scanning every uploaded asset and chat message. Has had public failures and recoveries; the size of the operation reflects the size of the problem they took on.
↳ If your platform invites user-generated content, the moderation budget is the platform.
Voice-only social VR is the hardest moderation problem in gaming. VRChat's path — community moderators, then audio fingerprinting, then ML voice classification — is the case study for what's possible when you can't read what people are saying.
↳ Voice is where T&S goes when text moderation gets easy. Plan budget accordingly.
Trust & Safety Lead, ideally reporting to a C-level not buried under marketing. At scale: separate Policy, Operations (moderators), and Engineering (tools + ML) functions.
Every piece of content in this pillar you finish earns credits toward your Trust & Safety level. See the full system at /level-up.