ABSTRACT
A significant volume of rigorous trust and safety research occurs within companies, but many barriers prevent making this work public. In this chapter, authored by members of the editorial team and board of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, we first discuss these hurdles – including fear of regulatory backlash and potential privacy risks – along with the numerous reasons why companies and society would benefit from publishing this research. We then describe how our journal incentivizes the publication of industry research and our efforts to increase the impact of trust and safety research more broadly. Now that the journal has been publishing for five years, we can analyze its 57 publications to assess how its content responds to these hurdles. Trust and safety encompasses a wide range of concerns, numerous major platforms, and a global user base. Which issues, platforms, and user groups receive the most attention? We find that: (1) a plurality of journal publications focus on harms related to misleading content, (2) a plurality of publications focus on Twitter (now X) and Meta, companies that have historically had accessible researcher APIs, and (3) while we publish many studies about harms in non-Western contexts, very few of our studies have a first author based in a non-Western country.
