Why You Shouldn't Lay Off Your Trust & Safety Department 🤨
I thought this was obvious by now
I realize that I’ve been unusually quiet in the wave of devastating layoffs that have swept through our industry. Let me start by acknowledging that I am one of the fortunate few who, at least for the time being, has managed to avoid being caught in the crosshairs of this brutal culling, and somehow am making it through the senseless gauntlet that is tech layoffs 2022-2023.
I’ve been struggling to find the right words to express my thoughts and feelings about this situation, which is wreaking havoc on the lives and livelihoods of so many people I know and care about. Many people have reached out across my network, expressing their concern for my well-being and checking to see if I’ve been impacted. And while I am so grateful for their kindness and support, I can’t help but feel guilty that I’ve been spared while others have not. I don’t need support, I think, spend that energy on the terrific humans who are caught in the stupid games being played amongst terrible leadership.
No, I’m still here, in my still-brand new role, grappling with uncertainty and the anxiety that my team is experiencing right now. I worry that I’m only a half-decent peace time leader, but am absolutely flailing as a “war time” leader. My team is looking to me for guidance and reassurance, they are trusting me with their career growth, and yet we still don’t know if they’re going to be laid off. (Yes, that’s right, Google has not announced when or where or who will be laid off in a handful of countries.) I worry that these wonderful, lovely people I’m charged with shepherding will pull the short end of the algorithm and I will be powerless to stop it.
Trust & Safety is a “critical function”. When I look across the past year and change, I am reminded of the times I had to fight, tooth-and-nail, to convince higher-ups across the smorgasbord of companies I’ve worked at to keep our moderators at home during the pandemic and subsequent waves of infection. These folks work for and with us, whether directly or indirectly, and they deserved the flexibility to work remotely to stay safe and healthy.
But here’s the thing - these companies labeled these functions as “office-critical”. This meant dragging our moderators back into an office straight out of Severance in places where there were no legal protections to stop my leadership from doing so. Let me repeat that for those in the back: Trust & Safety is so critical to functional UGC operations that big companies forced people to be in office to handle the work. During a pandemic. And now, they’re firing us if we don’t go back, and they’re laying us off even if we do go back, all the while talking out both sides of their mouths by repeating how critical we are. Critical. Critical. Critical. Bullshit.
The more we toss around the word "critical," the less it means. And as folks in T&S, we see desensitization of language happen all the time, both for better or for worse. It's like if you say "penis" enough times with your colleagues, eventually it becomes a mundane conversation you have in hallways because when we're talking about serious stuff like determining if a moderator is looking at a kid or an adult, we can't use anything but clinical terms. But THIS phenomenon, THIS watering down, is what happens when we hear the word "critical" over and over again in every layoff notice, post, or diatribe that we are all subjected to right now. Critical means nothing to anyone anymore.
Here's a free piece of advice for all company leaders out there: laying off people in your Trust & Safety department is an incredibly bad idea. How many people have the stomach to watch the terrible video of Tyre Nichols being brutally murdered by police just to determine how to initiate an incident response, sort through rapid fire uploads, and stabilize the situation? Who wants to pass along the guidelines of what is/is not a credible news organization discussing the horrors that humans inflict on each other, knowing that other flesh-and-blood humans will have to review each and every upload to confirm what type of actor is uploading the footage? Who wants to subject themselves to listening to racial slurs to check if it’s just violative enough to take action against the flaming garbage fire who uploaded it? How many of us are willing to sift through endless streams of content and grant a platform to those who actively seek to strip us of our rights, incite violence against our communities, and spread hate and destruction for their own selfish gain, all in the name of supposed "unbiased" policies? And then higher ups have the gall to espouse they’re “doing the right thing”? Who, exactly, is this the right thing for? Because it’s certainly not for humanity, that task lies with the people willing to do what I’ve laid out, and you’ve just laid them off.
TikTok, in a cheeky PR stunt, released a Trust & Safety center where one of the activities you can do is play a game where you moderate content according to policy. How cute. I can’t help but wonder if TikTok included their collection of kitten suffocation, jihadist beheadings, or child rape in their fun little game of pretending to do content moderation. And for the business influencers who toured the center, I have to ask: Did you see the pain of a child below the age of 5? 2? 1? Did you hear the bone saw? The fruitless, scared meows? Did you listen to it? Did you have a VP strut behind you and say, “I empathize with your decision to remove this, but actually we should allow this on the platform because [insert censorship, privacy, or just cause 🤷♀️ here]?” Because if you didn’t, you didn’t try moderation for an hour, you got placated by a corporation whose survival depends on people willing to look at the things you won’t. What a waste of money.
If you’re sensing any bitterness, you shouldn’t be sensing it, you should be drowning in it. I’m angry. I’m angry for my friends, angry at my industry, and angry that my children will inherit a culture that puts capitalism above all else, even if it means cutting the very staff tasked with protecting them from physical and mental harm. Twitter is a glaring example of what happens when you foolishly let go of the very people who work tirelessly to ensure your product doesn’t become a total dumpster fire for the world to see. Who would have guessed that racists, when given the freedom to do so, would be racist? Who would have guessed that people who want CSAM would seek CSAM? The people on the ground, Musk, the people who don’t have their heads so far shoved up their own ass as to not see the sun of awfulness that is always floating at the top of the surface of the waters of the internet, waiting to break free.
I don’t have much in the ways of words of wisdom. What I do know is that this situation is affecting people far smarter and better than me, and I hate that. And I know people who are more thoughtful than me have put together lists upon lists upon lists of resources to look at when job searching. I feel for the wonderful people now stuck in the Technology Hunger Games, hoping beyond hope that a recruiter will actually give their resume a chance instead of just sticking with the same old sources like LinkedIn.
Friends, for the first time in a long time, I don’t have encouragement. I don’t have advice. I just have rage.
As always, if you need someone to scream into the void with, reach out - I gotchu.
- Jess
Things Taking Up My Brain Space (ICYMI):