Trust and Safety: Platforms, Policies, Products

Catalog description

Trust & Safety is an emerging field that focuses on reducing the harm from interpersonal abuse in digital spaces. The abuse types involved - harassment, misinformation, unwanted sexual content - are often lawful but awful, requiring developers to build their own socio-technical frameworks of what is appropriate behavior in their platform. In this course, we will look at digital abuse through an analysis of historical incidents. We will study how the field developed standards across algorithmic response, product design and manual removals. Students will join teams to describe an emerging online abuse type, develop appropriate moderation pipelines (e.g., using modern machine learning such as LLMs), and detail associated policies, all in an environment mimicking the realities seen in practice. This course might expose students to disturbing material.