Pro Social on Safety by Design: A Recap

How should platforms be thinking about user safety as they build their products? That's the ambitious question Trust & Safety experts Jen Weedon and Sasha Mathew took on answering in TSPA's latest curriculum chapter "Safety by Design" - and was the topic of our conversation at our September Pro Social.

Not just design

"Safety by Design" (SbD), as Jen and Sasha explained, has a bit of a double meaning; it's both the design elements platforms can use to ensure their users' safety, but it's just as much - or more - about integrating work on user safety into the fabric of the product development process.

That was the major theme of the discussion. SbD shouldn't be relegated to "Trust & Safety" (T&S) teams, as an after-the-fact layer on top, but ideally is part of the processes and culture of a platform. All product teams, Jen and Sasha agreed, should be thinking about safety and looking at "the heart" of new design elements with safety in mind.

No one-size fits all solutions

Another reason SbD is more about process than specific design elements, is that there's no one set of solutions that fit across platforms; each come with their own set of safety risks, given both their products (e.g. social, commerce, gaming etc) and audience (e.g. young people, different cultures, etc.), that call for different safety considerations and tools.

Jen and Sasha also acknowledge that platforms are coming to safety at different levels of maturity and capacity. And that's okay; their chapter wants to meet platforms where they're at, pointing platforms to how they can evolve their Safety by Design processes wherever they are starting from.

Looking to sectors for prosocial innovation

One exciting turn of the conversation, for those of us at PDN who geek out on interventions, was to hear about some of the innovative work coming out of gaming and dating platforms. 

Jen strongly suggested we look for inspiration from gaming, where developers are very intentional about designing for prosocial outcomes, such as building community or strengthening resilience.

In discussing the safety and prosocial concerns of the dating industry, Sasha opened the door to how online design choices can encourage off-line prosocial behavior. Bumble, for example, uses "safety pledges" as a way to set their users up for healthy and successful dates IRL. 

More research please

At the end of the conversation we asked Jen and Sasha what research they'd like to see coming from academics. Sasha made a general call for, simply put, more: more research to understand what is effective design as well as more work to synthesize that research with an eye to what works in different contexts. In line with dating apps' concerns about off-line behavior, Sasha also called for more research on how online interventions can impact offline interactions. Jen added that we still need more research to demonstrate that Safety by Design is not just a moral imperative, but that it will help platforms' bottom lines with a greater ROI. Researchers, your work is cut out for you!

Watch the full conversation with Sasha and Jen below.

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