On 20 July, Toshali Sengupta moderated a panel with Aaron Tidman, Paul Clifford, Eric Han and Zoë Darmé on how Trust & Safety and Compliance can work together under growing regulatory pressure.

The discussion covered the operational impact of online-safety regulation, the areas where T&S teams now share responsibility for regulatory outcomes, and practical ways to strengthen collaboration between T&S, Compliance and Legal.

Our takeaway

Regulation is here to stay, and its implications increasingly reach directly into day-to-day T&S work.

At the same time, T&S teams are often already aware of their operational problems, while Product and Engineering may leave them to address those problems largely on their own. Working more closely with Legal and Compliance can help T&S teams make these challenges more visible across the organisation.

On 21 July, Julie de Bailliencourt and Pál Boza led an interactive workshop, with support from Lorenzo Ancona.

Participants worked in groups representing functions such as Sales, Public Policy, Legal and Product within a fictional social media company with an understaffed T&S team. They had to pursue their own business objectives while responding to unexpected regulatory, technical and reputational challenges.

Our takeaways

By stepping into the roles of teams outside T&S, participants experienced how important coordination and prioritisation are to running T&S operations. The exercise also made the dependencies visible in both directions: other departments rely on T&S, while T&S depends on the wider organisation.

The workshop showed that T&S creates value across the company by helping functions such as Sales, Product and Legal achieve their goals. When T&S is under-resourced, the impact can spread across the organisation in ways that are far-reaching and difficult to predict.

It also highlighted how important it is for T&S teams to frame their work in the language of other departments. One reflection from our team was that a future version could mix the different groups together, allowing participants to negotiate competing priorities rather than continuing to work within separate functional silos.