ABSTRACT
Public discourse and regulatory debates about online trust and safety have long been dominated by a focus on rules, not tools: preoccupied mostly by the question of how to set rules around potentially harmful content. Less explored have been the product and engineering dimensions of how companies implement the policies they select—that is, the tools and systems companies rely on to translate trust and safety from theory into practice. This gap leaves the mechanics of online safety work opaque, hindering user transparency and slowing technical innovation. Based on a systematic review of available trust and safety tools and on interviews with more than 40 trust and safety practitioners, this paper proposes the “DIRE” framework, for Detection, Investigation, Review, and Enforcement: a taxonomy for mapping and analyzing the tools that make trust and safety work possible.
