What is Trust and Safety in the Digital World

Can you imagine modern life without the Internet and online activities? Today, nearly every company has a website, online community, or a page on social media, attracting more customers and studying potential target audiences. Businesses try to be as close to online users as possible, so creating a safe and trustworthy environment is important. 

Let’s explore what is trust and safety concept. We will review common risks you may face during company online activity, trust and safety issues, their role for industries, and modern technologies that can ensure online safety. We’ve also prepared a few recommendations on how to build trust with your customers through T&S.

What is trust and safety?

The trust and safety (T&S) concept means ensuring safe online platforms for users. refers to the policies, processes, and technologies that protect users from harm, ensure compliance, and foster a secure online environment.

The trust part of the concept gives users confidence in the platform's fairness, reliability, and respect for users' rights. Safety refers to high protection from harmful actions, including risky content, fraud, harassment, or potential threats.

As you can see, the main goal of trust and security is user protection. It involves active measures like detection, prevention, and reports, as well as proactive measures like verification and internal community rules.

What does trust and safety do?

With the help of content moderation, T&S can protect users from potentially harmful content. Automated solutions and human teams control, detect, and remove such elements as disinformation, graphic violence, hate speech, etc.

It also helps to ensure compliance with internal community guidelines and policies. T&S protects vulnerable groups of people and minimizes the risk of online abuse, bullying, or harassment.  

T&S plays a key role in fraud prevention. Manual checks and artificial intelligence allow the detection and prevention of scams, identity thefts, and account takeovers with a new level of accuracy and reliability.

Trust and safety protects users' privacy and the security of their personal information. Robust measures like encryption minimize the risk of hacking or unauthorized access to sensitive data. It prevents potential harm and helps to maintain legal compliance with such regulations as GDPR and COPPA.

What is trust and safety: Key elements

Trust and safety ensure that all users get a safe and reliable experience on the platform. It can be achieved with the help of three main elements: moderation, fraud detection, and policy. Let's look at each of them and find out how they can help.

Moderation

So, what is the trust and safety team's mission? Human reviewers should monitor, check flagged content, and remove anything that could cause harm. Fast reaction and balance between human empathy and cutting-edge technologies make moderation more reliable and efficient. Companies should also regularly update moderation policies to demonstrate platform values, social norms, and protection measures against abuse.

Moderators can conduct checks manually or apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance the control over user-generated content. Humans will not be able to process vast amounts of data within a short period, but AI can analyze the content fast and flag harmful and inappropriate data such as hate speech, violence, or scams.

Fraud detection

This focus area of T&S analyzes user behavior and detects suspicious activities like creating fake accounts, fraudulent payments, phishing attempts, etc. Artificial intelligence is good at analyzing large amounts of data and quickly detecting and flagging unusual behaviors (like a bunch of transactions in minutes from new users). Through real-time monitoring, automated solutions can check millions of transactions simultaneously.

Human expertise is also vital for fraud detection, especially during complex case investigations. A human team can review flagged actions and accounts to ensure no false alarms occur. They are responsible for up-to-date rules and policies provided to AI models in case of any changes in policy or fraud detection tactics. Regular checks also help to ensure that AI treats everybody equally and that no groups get unfair preferences.

Policy enforcement

Clear and available platform rules allow the creation and maintenance of safe and fair space for users, as they can contain guidelines and a set of actions in case of violation. Platform policy is a reliable way to demonstrate what kind of behavior is considered unacceptable. For example, no hate speech, racism, abuse, fraud, or scam actions are allowed. Traditionally, all the rules are publicly available in the Terms of Service section of the website.

Armed with automated tools, human teams can control users' behavior and react to possible violations through warnings, temporary restrictions, bans, or legal actions in severe cases. 

Trust and safety meaning for the industries

According to our experience, all industries can get an advantage from applying trust and safety measures, but for some areas, T&S has an especially crucial meaning. Let's see where the nature of services makes trust and safety vital for stable operation and safe user activities.

Social media

Regarding areas with user-generated content, T&S should be integral to user protection from potentially harmful actions and materials. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok are based on content generated by page owners and require fast and accurate moderation. It helps to avoid potential risks of hate speech, disinformation, or scam. According to the survey, 21% lost money because of scams through social media, and 26.7% more faced scams but were lucky enough to avoid financial losses.

Dating services

Platforms and applications for dating are extremely risky areas of potential online abuse. Such risks may include scams, non-consensual intimate imagery, sexual exploitation, harassment, human trafficking, and fraud. For people who are looking for romantic partners online, a safe environment is a critical factor. That is why we recommend applying human and advanced AI-powered moderation to enhance accuracy and efficiency and minimize dangerous activity.

Marketplaces

Trust and safety measures are key for fraud protection in wholesale and retail markets. Secure payment, verification of buyer identity, authenticity of products, and reports about scams and fake goods help to create safe buying and selling space. Customers want to be sure that their sensitive information, including personal and credit card data, is protected, and sellers want to protect their reputation and avoid potential losses.

What is trust and safety in fraud prevention?

As mentioned above, trust and safety help ensure the platform is safe, reliable, and free from harmful activities. T&S ensures user protection and confidence by detecting and mitigating suspicious activities and enhancing trust in the platform. It accurately monitors interactions and analyzes user behaviors to take necessary steps before any escalation occurs. 

Safety and trust: Best tools for fraud detection

Our experts consider artificial intelligence one of the best approaches to fraud detection enhancement. The reason is simple: AI can analyze a huge amount of data faster and more accurately than any human. It can enhance transaction monitoring and help safety teams to identify risks more productively.

Machine learning algorithms learn the difference between normal behaviors and possible deviations. ML uses previous experience to detect and flag anomalies with continuously improving quality. Predictive capabilities of AI allow safety teams to predict fraud risk based on historical data and provide protection measures in advance. 

Behavior analytics tools study user behavior, including login times, search patterns, and transaction habits. It uses unusual patterns in action as indicators of authorized access to accounts and fraudulent activities.

Human review processes and proactive fraud prevention strategies

Although automated tools are perfect for fast pattern identification, human judgment is essential for correct interpretation and AI-model development. Sometimes, machine decision-making can create false positive indications, and manual checks help to adjust the process and minimize the risk of such cases. 

Human reviewers can make informed decisions based on AI's analysis and request additional verification, block the account, or apply law enforcement measures if required. Our experts recommend using human teams' feedback as material for further improvement and tailoring AI and ML models. 

If you want to enhance the protection even further, we suggest to use such methods as:

• Real-time monitoring;
• Multi-factor authentication;
• User education about strong passwords and other protection measures;
• Regular updates of the system.

Building trust with customers through T&S

Suppose you want to build strong connections with your customers and ensure their trust and loyalty to your company. In that case, we recommend you provide visible measures as the first step to reliability.

Customers feel safer when they see SSL certificates on your platform, trust seals, and verified badges that show that their personal and financial information is safe and protected.

Safety measures like multi-factor authentication, payment confirmation, and encryption protocols make users more confident about platform use and put trust in your brand. The protection from unauthorized access will not only save users from risk but also improve your reputation. 

Real-time alerts and monitoring will serve as obvious signs of round-the-clock monitoring. If the customer knows that any unusual activity will be noticed and they will get a notification, they can use products and services without fear.

We believe that one of the best practices for building trust is the development of transparency and clear communication with customers. 

Customers feel safer knowing how their data is handled, what security measures take place, and how incidents are managed. You may include such information in your privacy policy section. If a security breach happens, quickly and clearly explain the situation to the affected and inform how your customers can protect themselves further.

Know who you trust

Investments in trust and safety are a long-term strategy for success that helps you build strong and deep relationships with your customers. By applying protective measures, you make your online platform a safe space with interactions free of potentially dangerous activities and moral and financial harm. T&S approach will also help to show your company as a trustworthy brand with a good reputation and care about customers' wellbeing.