In August 2026, Meta agreed to pay roughly $17 to $18 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a coalition of 51 attorneys general, alleging the company built features into Instagram and Facebook that drove compulsive use among children and teens. The settlement's actual remedies are telling: a
Every major social media company now runs an entire industry's worth of infrastructure dedicated to keeping users safe. Trust and Safety (T&S) teams, content moderation vendors, age-verification partners, crisis-response hotlines baked into apps, machine-learning classifiers trained to catch grooming and self-harm content:
Trust & Safety teams are asked to do something close to impossible: catch harmful content before it spreads, across every country, every language, and every platform, in real time. The internet was not built with this problem in mind, and the tools we have today, from law, to moderation systems,
Most platforms are built to catch bad posts. The harder problem — and the more consequential one — is catching bad actors before the harm is done and protecting against harmful behavior. When content gets flagged on a social platform such as a hateful comment, a graphic image, a threat of violence
Over the last few years, the Trust & Safety industry has seen rapid changes due to machine learning and AI, global regulations, and platform growth. It is no longer an entry-level friendly industry with a lot of opportunities in Western countries for recent graduates. I am asked often how