Read-Outs from RightsCon 2025
TSF attended RightsCon for the first time in 2025, co-hosting two sessions: “Empowering Collaboration: Bridging the Gap Between Trust & Safety Teams and Civil Society in the Global Majority” and “Advancing Trust & Safety for the Global Majority.” The former was a private meeting co-organized with the Global Network Initiative (GNI) and the latter was a roundtable supported by the Global Majority Research Committee (GMRC). You can learn more about both sessions by downloading the read-out for the private meeting here and the roundtable here.
Workshop Report: Engaging Trust & Safety and Human Rights Practitioners on Rights-Respecting Responses to Government Demands
In October 2025, TSF and the Global Network Initiative (GNI) jointly hosted a virtual workshop “Engaging Trust & Safety and Human Rights Practitioners on Rights-Respecting Responses to Government Demands” to explore engagement across these two fields, in the context of how social media companies can respond to government demands while respecting user rights. The workshop set out to understand the shared goals and objectives between the trust & safety and human rights fields, as well as differences in approaches, guiding principles, and understanding of effectiveness, all in the context of responding to government demands.
TSF and GNI published a high-level summary report from that workshop, alongside the hypothetical tabletop exercise that was used to guide the conversation. The report summarizes key takeaways, which could be fruitful for further discussion by the participating organizations and the field at large. The tabletop exercise offers a structure to host similar conversations and build on this work.
TSF and GNI look forward to continuing these conversations. We are keen to hear your ideas on questions, approaches, and outputs to explore ways to continue to foster productive conversations across the human rights and trust and safety fields. Please reach out to our organizations with any questions or ideas.
Language Support, Content Moderation, and Tooling Roundtable Report
In July 2024, TSF hosted an in-person roundtable at TrustCon. The initial goal of this event was to bring together a range of stakeholders from academia, the tech industry, and civil society to discuss language support, content moderation, and tooling with the aim of identifying and naming existing gaps, ideating together about possible solutions, and discussing how LLMs and/or AI factor into these present and future considerations. However, the conversations that took place during the roundtable centered more on the results of a survey the participants had taken ahead of time and on the theme of collaboration—and, importantly, why it is so hard.
This report provides an overview of the roundtable discussion; describes what the unmet desire survey is, why TSF chose to use it, and how its results helped structure this particular conversation; and shares what was learned so that others seeking to foster multistakeholder collaborations in the T&S ecosystem can build on these insights. Key takeaways include:
- In general, participants were open to both informal and formal collaborations with different stakeholders, with a preference for establishing informal relationships before moving to more formal working relationships.
- Differing priorities, constraints, incentives, and assumptions make collaboration challenging. Oftentimes, participants also find it difficult to disentangle other stakeholders’ identities from their organizational affiliations.
- Individuals in the T&S ecosystem often operate within employment arrangements that de-incentivize collaboration with other stakeholder groups, especially those that are external to one’s organization/employer.
You can download the report here.
Elections Roundtable Report
In May 2024, TSF hosted a virtual roundtable about elections, mis/disinformation, and the use of technologies, bringing together more than 30 participants from academia, civil society, and the tech industry. The main goals of this conversation were to connect relevant stakeholders, understand what they need from each other, and identify ways to effectively collaborate to ensure the safety of elections—thereby helping to protect democracies around the world.
This report provides an overview of the roundtable discussion; describes what the unmet desire survey is, why TSF chose to use it, and how its results helped structure this particular conversation; and shares conclusions and recommendations that could inform not only the work being done by roundtable participants but also by those individuals and organizations doing relevant work and looking for new collaborations. Key takeaways include:
- There are more similarities than differences in the way stakeholder groups think about the problem space and their individual needs, and there is a need for a shift away from apocalyptic narratives about AI;
- There is a need for data access, more transparency, capacity building and funding, and more collaboration and agreements between stakeholders;
- In order to ultimately breach the gap between these three stakeholders, it would be necessary to specifically address the solutions phase, and find ways to complement and inform the work being done by other actors in the field.
You can download the report here.