So, what is trust and safety? Trust and safety refers to the services that measure and implement guidelines that help a company create a safe environment that their customers and employees trust to interact with each other.

Trust and safety encompasses activities designed to secure digital platforms and protect users from harmful content, such as implementing policies that safeguard personal data and manage user interactions on digital platforms.

As stated by Emerald Insight, high education institutions particularly emphasize creating a safe and inclusive environment for all stakeholders. This is necessary to ensure quality work while establishing an organization centered around shared interests, open communication, honesty, positivity, good intentions, and strong relationships.

Now that you know what is trust and safety, it is time for you to understand what does trust and safety do. Here are some services that can keep you safe and improve your customers' trust:

1. Content Moderation

Content moderation is the process of reviewing flagged content and determining whether it upholds or violates community guidelines, content policy, and/or regulations.

This can either be done manually or automated through technologies such as AI. But there is also a third alternative: combining both to make the most out of each method. Whatever alternative you choose, it is important to be vocal about your guidelines, policies, and regulations to avoid misunderstandings and prevent your customers from being exposed to harmful content.

2. Fraud Detection and Prevention:

These services act as digital watchdogs, employing cutting-edge technologies like machine learning and data analytics to detect and prevent various forms of fraud.

They keep a sharp eye out for suspicious patterns and activities, safeguarding businesses from financial losses and preserving trust. 

It’s important to implement training courses for all your employees, so they can stay up-to-date with the latest fraud detection and scam prevention techniques. Following a continuous training culture will ensure that your employees will not easily fall for fraud and will be able to detect potential risks for your company and customers.

3. Compliance Monitoring:

Regulatory vigilance services monitor business operations to ensure compliance with industry regulations, legal standards, and internal policies.

Keeping a close watch on transactions and communications helps mitigate risks and uphold integrity.

Each industry has its own set of regulatory compliance standards to which they must adhere to ensure a safe customer and employee journey. For example, BPOs are regulated by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and several other compliance standards that they must follow.

4. User Verification:

These services verify the authenticity of individuals accessing online platforms or conducting transactions.

Methods such as biometric authentication and document verification fortify defenses against unauthorized access and identity theft.

If you work with a software company, banking/financial institution, password application, and many other companies where sensitive information is involved, then you must make sure that your customers’ data is well protected by applying as many security measures as you can, to avoid any potential issues.

5. Brand Protection:

Vigilant monitoring and proactive measures detect counterfeit products, combat trademark infringements, and shield businesses from reputational harm. It is also important that your company’s private information and property are well protected by implementing security measures.

If you protect your brand you are going to: create a great reputation, prevent negative associations, avoid revenue loss by negative comments, protect your market share, maintain a strong online presence, and many other benefits that come from implementing brand protection strategies.

You may be wondering: what is a trust and safety specialist? A trust and safety specialist is a professional responsible for maintaining users' and employees' security, integrity, and well-being on a platform, service, or within an organization. So, what is their primary focus? They need to prevent harm, reduce risks, and make sure that a platform is being compliant with any policies, international regulations, and ethical standards.

Said regulations need to be industry-related, and generally accepted like national or international standards. So, platforms need to comply with these regulations that ensure a safe space for users.

These specialists work in industries such as social media, e-commerce, online marketplaces, gaming, and financial services, essentially, any sector where user interactions, content moderation, or transactions occur.

Main skills they need:

• Analytical Skills. To detect patterns of abuse, fraud, and policy violations.
• Technical Knowledge. Familiarity with AI moderation tools, cybersecurity, and compliance laws.
• Strong Communication. To interact with users, law enforcement, and internal teams.
• Ethical Judgment. The ability to make fair, unbiased decisions in complex situations.

Trust and safety tools and policies in institutions involve a detailed and strategic approach that integrates safety considerations throughout the organizational structure. This includes regular updates to policies based on evolving technological landscapes and emerging threats, as well as compliance with educational guidelines and legal requirements​.

Corporations are increasingly adopting AI-driven solutions to monitor and analyze user behavior, helping them identify and mitigate potential threats in real time.

To ensure that all stakeholders understand their roles in maintaining a safe environment. Such proactive strategies are vital in cultivating a culture of trust and safety that supports business integrity and customer confidence.

1. NPL – Natural Language Processing

Takes spoken and written words and translates them into data that can then be analyzed into parts of speech, advanced language models, and more.

This technology helps companies analyze text in real-time and assists them in identifying harmful content such as:

1. Hate speech and harassment.
2. Misinformation and propaganda.
3. Scam attempts and phishing messages.
4. Self-harm or suicide-related content.
   

2. OCR – Optical Character Recognition

Runs on images and recognizes written text, whether in a post, video, or image and then converts the written text into data. OCR model can be used to look for sexual content in phrases or search for sexual keywords.

OCR is especially useful in detecting:

1. Harmful language in memes, screenshots, or video captions.
2. Posts promoting banned substances or products/services.
3. Sensitive personal data in uploaded images (e.g., credit card numbers, addresses, social security numbers).
4. Sexual or violent content embedded in text overlays.
   

3. Digital Hash Technology

Used for video and image-based content, digital hashing determines whether an image has been encountered before or has similarities with other images/content.

This technology is crucial in:

1. Detecting and removing previously flagged harmful images or videos.
2. Preventing the re-uploading of banned or illegal content (e.g., child exploitation material, terrorist propaganda).
3. Tracking the spread of deepfake content and manipulated media.

4. Behavior Analysis and Anomaly Detection

Behavior analysis tools use machine learning algorithms to track and detect unusual user behavior that may indicate fraudulent or malicious activity. These systems analyze:

1. Sudden spikes in account activity (e.g., mass creation of fake profiles).
2. Repetitive posting patterns that suggest spam or bot behavior.
3. Account takeovers based on login location or device changes.
4. Coordinated attacks, such as review bombing.

5. AI-Powered Image and Video Moderation

AI-driven content moderation tools analyze images and videos in real time to detect and filter inappropriate or illegal content. These tools use deep learning models to identify:

1. Nudity and sexually explicit content.
2. Graphic violence and self-harm imagery.
3. Hate symbols and extremist propaganda.
4. Copyrighted material violations.

Pros and cons of trust and safety

Advantages of hiring trust and safety services:

1. Reduces the risk of harmful content. Moderating content will reduce the risk of exposing your users to harmful and illegal content, enhancing their trust.
2. Regulation compliance. With trust and safety services you will make sure that your company follows regulations and complies with their guidelines.
3. Better user experience. User experience is enhanced by offering a safe environment for them to interact with each other.
4. Scalability options if you outsource. If you outsource your trust and safety, then you can have the option to scale up or down depending on your needs.
5. Customer retention increases. Offering a safe environment increases your users’ trust and retention.

Knowing why is trust and safety important is not only to list the benefits you’ll get by hiring these services but also knowing how to react to the challenges you are going to be facing.

Challenges of hiring trust and safety solutions: 

1. Can lead to false positives. If you outsource or automate your trust and safety team, then without proper training they can make mistakes like erasing content that’s not harmful.
2. Scalability issues if you hire in-house. If you do not outsource your team, then you will need to invest a lot of resources and effort to hire new members when needed.
3. You need to moderate your moderation. Over-moderating your content will create a space where your users won’t be able to talk freely.
4. More investment in safety methods. You need to moderate and secure your team, so you need to invest in more security methods to ensure a safe space for them too.
5. Leveraging moderation and free speech may be difficult. There is a fine line between moderating and limiting freedom of speech, leveraging its differences may be difficult at first.

To measure your trust and safety team’s success you must conduct regular performance meetings. To have better insights into the areas of improvement, the following trust and safety metrics must be measured:

1. Average reaction time: This metric measures the average time it takes for your team to react when inappropriate content is flagged out by a software or user. Measuring this will help your company improve the reaction time to prevent your users from being exposed.
2. Detection rate: Measuring this will help you evaluate the accuracy of your trust and safety team, and their precision when dealing with unauthorized content.
3. Cost per moderation: Cost per moderation will help you measure how much you are investing in each moderated post. This means that you are measuring the individual cost of each image, text, comment, or video that was eliminated from your social channels compared to the overall cost of the service.
4. Customer trust rate: A metric that will help you evaluate the efficiency of your moderation and trust strategy. You can measure it with a survey that will provide a percentage of how trustful your audience perceives your company.

These are not the only trust and safety metrics that exist, but these are some of the most common ones businesses measure in order to evaluate their team’s performance.

Building safety measures on a digital platform

In order to build effective safety measures, you need to have a combination of strategic planning as well as a tailored approach to the specific risks and those regulatory requirements your business must adhere to. 

So, to face the task of building safety measures companies must establish robust policies that address data protection and user privacy, they must also prevent fraudulent activities. This includes employing advanced security technologies like encryption, two-factor authentication, and sophisticated fraud detection systems.

Let us share some trust and safety best practices that your company needs to follow to ensure safety measures. Those include the following:

1. Identify your current needs and evaluate your workflows:

Before implementing any safety measures, companies need to evaluate their existing risks and vulnerabilities. You may be wondering what should be evaluated, well this involves:

• An analysis of how users interact with the platform and with that you can identify potential negative patterns.
• Monitor and evaluate your current security measures in order to detect gaps in protection and start optimizing them.
• Understanding regulatory requirements specific to the industry if you still have not applied them to your company.

2. There must be a set of clear policies.

Why is this important? Because a well-defined set of policies is the main foundation for trust and safety. These policies should:

• Clearly outline acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. Be vocal about them to avoid misunderstandings.
• Establish a list of consequences and actions for violations, such as warnings, suspensions, or permanent bans.
• Align to any legal and ethical standards that will help your business ensure compliance.

3. There must be clear reporting mechanisms and steps.

You need to give your users and employees an easy way to report harmful or suspicious activity. This is essential for maintaining a safe environment in your own digital space. Best practices for reporting mechanisms include:

• Creating an optimized, intuitive, and easily accessible reporting system (e.g., report buttons on content, dedicated support emails). This needs to be well-optimized for your users, the processes should be easily followed for them to have a great experience.
• Implementing automated systems that help you detect high-risk content before users report it.
• Ensuring great responses and clear follow-ups to user reports. 
  

4. You need a clear strategy.

A well-thought-out trust and safety strategy is effective, but it requires long-term planning and adaptability. In order to succeed, companies should:

• Align their trust and safety goals with the overall business objectives.
• Develop a roadmap for continuously improving security measures. This includes how often they need to be evaluated.
• Invest necessary resources to keep pace with emerging threats.

5. Build the team you need.

Trust and safety efforts require dedicated professionals to oversee policies, enforcement, and security technologies. So you don’t only need to build a team, they should be the right people to take care of your company’s digital safety. So, a strong team should include:

• Trust and Safety Specialists. They are in charge of managing moderation, policy enforcement, and user protection.
• Cybersecurity Experts. These people need to be in charge of preventing data breaches, fraud, and account takeovers.
• Legal and Compliance Officers. They are in charge of ensuring adherence to privacy laws and regulatory standards.

6. There must be continuous training.

Threats in the digital space are constantly evolving, so your business needs to be prepared for them. This makes ongoing education a critical aspect of your company. Companies should:

• Make sure to train their employees regularly on security protocols, fraud prevention, and content moderation.
• Keep your teams updated on new compliance regulations and industry best practices.
• You must offer workshops on emerging risks such as AI-generated threats, deepfakes, and evolving scam tactics.

Now that you have a better idea of what is trust and safety, its importance, and best practices you know that cultivating trust and safety culture involves continuous engagement and education of all members within an organization. This includes training programs, regular communication about policies, and clear guidelines on reporting and handling safety issues. Educational institutions often lead by example, promoting a culture where safety and well-being are prioritized​.

Trust and safety are foundational to the success and reliability of any institution. That is why at Horatio, we prioritize ongoing attention, adaptation, and proactive engagement to stay ahead with the latest technological and operational advancements.

Contact us to enhance your reputation and operational effectiveness.