Trust & Safety Tycoon: Try Your Hand At Managing A Social Media Trust & Safety Team
Play Trust & Safety Tycoon in your browser on desktop or mobile
Today we're super excited to launch Trust & Safety Tycoon, a video game simulating what it's like to run a trust & safety team at a fictitious, rapidly scaling social media company called Yapper*. If you've ever wanted to see how you'd do as the head of trust & safety, now is your chance.
Over the last few years we've spent a lot of time and effort trying to educate people on the concept of trust & safety" at an internet platform, as it's something that many people have strong opinions about, but very little direct experience with themselves. It's why we ran the content moderation case study series for a while. It's why we've written thousands of articles about content moderation and trust & safety here on Techdirt. And it's why earlier this year, we created the Moderator Mayhem mobile game, to give people a taste of what's it's like to be a front line content moderator.
And now we're launching Trust & Safety Tycoon. This browser-based game (which works on both mobile and desktop browsers) is a different kind of trust & safety simulator from the last game. While that game was about being a front line content moderator, this game is about actually running a trust & safety team for a rapidly scaling social media startup. You have to set policies, deal with various dilemmas, face internal and external pressures, weigh tradeoffs, determine resource allocation and more, all while trying to keep your website from descending into a cesspit of hate, driving away users and advertisers.
As with Moderator Mayhem, our goal with Trust & Safety Tycoon is to help more people better understand the kinds of dilemmas, nuances, and challenges of handling trust & safety these days. Too many people have very strong feelings about how it should work, despite having little experience in how things actually work.
Trust & Safety Tycoon gives people a chance to try out their own ideas on how to manage a trust & safety program at a startup and see how well it works. There is no right" answer with any of this, but not all decisions will lead to positive outcomes for you, or the company you're working for. How will you handle concerns from your team, the CEO, or the media? How will you handle a crisis when your team is already overwhelmed? Will you cause an international incident that gets you called to answer questions from Congress?
This game was developed with support from the Hewlett Foundation, and in association with the Atlantic Council's recent Taskforce for a Trustworthy Future Web, which we spoke about earlier this year when its report on scaling trust came out. If you didn't want to read that (excellent) 150 page report, think of this game as a somewhat more fun way of thinking through many of the same ideas.
The Director of the Democracy & Tech initiative at the Atlantic Council, Rose Jackson, told us, As more people tune into questions around online harms, tech company decisionmaking, and how to keep the internet safe, this game is an invaluable resource to help people understand the tradeoffs at play. Anyone who cares about what they see online will benefit from this fun and thought-provoking experience."
We're excited to support this innovative approach to helping people understand the hard trade-offs involved in trust and safety-not just content moderation, but also building tools, running global operations, and finding the diverse group of talented people needed to do all these things" said Eli Sugarman, director of the Hewlett Foundation's Cyber Initiative.Mike Masnick and his team, and the group of experts who advised them, have done a great job of creating a fun and engaging game about the challenges involved in keeping people safe online."
As with our previous games, this game was a collaboration between our Copia Gaming effort and Randy Lubin at Leveraged Play.
* Any similarities to any real social media companies are purely coincidental entirely on purpose.
Play Trust & Safety Tycoon in your browser on desktop or mobile