Trust and Safety (T&S) is a term commonly used in the context of online platforms, communities, and services. It refers to the policies, practices, products and teams dedicated to ensuring that users can trust and feel safe while using a service or participating in an online community.

Trust plays a key role in the daily encounters with the internet, primarily because individuals and customers heavily depend on online technologies for their communicative and commercial engagements.^[1]

One of the core objectives of trust and safety^[2] is to ensure that a web portal or digital platform is a trusted, safe environment, where personal identity, data and virtual assets are protected.  

T&S helps achieve this by enforcing various measures and tools, such as policies and guidelines for what is an acceptable code of conduct/behaviour, monitoring data breaches and malicious or harmful activities, and by addressing incidents and cybercrimes quickly.

By investing in the trust and safety^[3] of digital platforms, brands establish themselves, as safe and reliable online destinations, building strong relationships with their users,^[4] thus, protecting their reputation.

Trust and safety encompasses a range of services, including:

• Data security measures, such as encryption, secure storage, and restricted access controls protect user data from unauthorised access.
• Content moderation^[5] services involve reviewing content created by user-named user-generated content in the industry-and removing what is inappropriate, such as hate speech, misinformation,^[6] graphic or video violence and any other non compliant materials
• Cybersecurity solutions^[7] like firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, VPNs, antivirus software, and authentication solutions, eliminate the risk of hacking, data breaches, and other malicious activities.
• Real-time monitoring, allows for quick and automated threat detection and prompt response to incidents.
• Tools such as digital wallets, blockchain technology, MFA solutions, digital asset management platforms, or virtual asset recovery services enable the protection of virtual assets such as digital currency, in-game items, or other digital assets.The perceived level of trust by an individual plays a crucial role in strengthening the relationship between their behavioral intentions and actual usage, especially in the context of digital wallets.^[8]

Some companies in the Trust and Safety space include:

• ActiveFense claims end-to-end AI-powered solutions for detecting fraud, harmful content, misinformation, and other trust-and-safety issues.
• Besedo states that it provides “a complete, scalable solution for better content moderation.”
• Checkstep has built a content moderation system that scans text and images and either removes it immediately, sends it for human moderation, or approves for publication. The company claims “instant integration” with “no coding required.”
• Cinder, started in 2021 by Glen Wise and Phil Brennan, who met at Facebook. Cinder closed $14M in 2022.^[9]
• Cove offers a suite of Trust & Safety tools.
• Genpact a company that provides general AI services, has a trust and safety product offering.
• Hive offers AI models for identifying harmful text and audio content, for age verification, that can identify AI generated images and text, detect logos, and even help companies placing context-dependent advertisements.
• Jigsaw, a Trust and Safety research group within Google.
• Pasabi which claims that it can “detect bad actors on your platform at scale” including actors that make fake accounts, leave fake reviews, attempt to sell counterfeit goods and participate in other scams.
• Pipl, a digital identity verification firm.
• Sift, a fraud detection company founded in 2011, is one of the older trust and safety companies. Today the company offers a variety of industry- and application-specific fraud detection approaches and claims many well-known e-commence companies among its customers.
• Tremau has built a moderation platform for Trust & Safety operations.
• TrustLab has an AI system for detecting misinformation.
• Unitary which offers AI-based Virtual moderation agent.
• WebPurify which offers content moderation services.

• Cyberethics