The Evolution of Trust and Safety

There are only a few more episodes of Impossible Tradeoffs for 2023! Today’s fun tradeoff question is a real challenge:From past tradeoff questions, most of you who took the polls prefer to live in the city (81%) rather than the country (19%). An equal number of you like to travel by plane and automobile (38%), and 25% of you like to take the train.Also, don’t forget to take this quick survey to let me know your thoughts about the podcast and what you want to see in 2024!Let’s get to this week’s podcast, which is with the amazing Dave Willner.Charlotte and Dave Willner.If you told me that the last breath of democracy would be picking rulers of the world, I would pick the Willners. I’ve known them both since my early Facebook days when they helped create the first content policies for the platform. They’ve both gone on to work at numerous platforms, and Charlotte runs the Trust and Safety Professionals Association. We don’t always agree, but I’ve never met two more thoughtful people on balancing really hard tradeoffs.Dave joins us in conversation this week to talk about those challenging decisions. About how the field got started and has since evolved. He most recently was at OpenAI, where among the billion things he was doing, he was looking at how AI could be used for content moderation. He recently left so that he could focus more time on his family while still advising in this space. It’s a worthwhile story to be told that it’s okay to jump off the rocketship sometimes. Enjoy!Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this podcast. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anchorchange.substack.com/subscribe