Class Visit: CS 5342/INFO 5320 Trust and Safety: Platforms, Policies, Products

By: Leah Ferentinos & Daria Vaisman

Trust & Safety is an emerging field that focuses on reducing the harm from interpersonal abuse in digital spaces. The abuse types involved—harassment, misinformation, unwanted sexual content—are often lawful but awful, requiring developers to build their own socio-technical frameworks of what is appropriate behavior in their platform.

In this course, students examine digital abuse through an analysis of historical incidents and study how the field developed standards across algorithmic response, product design, and manual removals. Students work in teams to describe an emerging online abuse type, develop appropriate moderation pipelines (including the use of modern machine learning such as LLMs), and detail associated policies in an environment that mimics real-world practice.

The course may expose students to disturbing material.