Sharing a Call for Proposals for a special issue of Internet Histories Toby Shulruff and I are editing. Submissions are due May 1, 2026. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions.
Interrogating Trust & Safety Over the last several decades, digital platforms have increasingly pervaded almost every sphere of our lives (e.g. commerce, dating, health, education, employment, entertainment, networking, communication). Consequently, platform-side Trust & Safety—a professional field dedicated to user safety and platform integrity—has become indispensable. Though largely behind-the-scenes, T&S teams are charged with enhancing the brand perceptions and protecting the user bases of large platforms and startups alike. It’s a unique practice that is both a guarded specialty as well as a matter of public interest.
But what do we really know about the history of trust and safety (broadly construed) or the development of platform-side Trust & Safety? While related topics have begun to garner more public attention, scholarly work that thoughtfully historicizes the development of the field and/or profession, the role of companies and/or platforms, the nature of the relationships between a variety of stakeholders in the space, the evolving nature of practices, processes, tools, and/or products, and historical precedents for and impacts of regulatory acts is lacking. Given the rapidly evolving nature of the ecosystem and the centrality of work across the whole of the internet—from domain registration to content moderation—we propose a special issue of Internet Histories dedicated to topics directly related to historicizing all aspects of trust and safety: the ecosystem, field, domain, practice, protocols and tools, and profession. We encourage authors to interrogate trust and safety from a range of perspectives, prioritizing academic rigor and historical dimensions.
Possible topics may include:
The professionalization of T&S. Early platform-side T&S teams and operations. How trust and safety work has evolved across specific regions and geographies. Histories of T&S beyond content moderation (i.e., other types of products/services such as ride-share, dating, and services apps; online marketplaces; and internet-connected devices). Various harm/risk areas (e.g., child safety, terrorism/extremism, elections, or mis/disinformation) across decades. How early T&S addressed technological impacts/affordances for communities in the 2000s, 2010s (before the term became widely adopted). Origins and evolutions as maintenance or care work. Gender and the history of T&S work (particularly in areas like child safety or technology-facilitated gender-based violence). The role of nonprofit organizations and civil society in the shaping of platform-side T&S. The history of regulatory decisions and their impact on current and future practices. How, when, and why law enforcement and national security became involved in trust and safety. The impacts of platform-side T&S on community moderators and managers. This special issue will explore these questions—and many others—through a range of theoretical frames (for example, postcolonial, genealogical, historical materialist, feminist, STS, organizational development, cybernetic, international relations, disruption and hype cycles, world systems, globalization) and approaches (for example, archival, oral history, historiographic, commodity chain, ethnographic, social network, policy sciences) as proposed by authors. It will also strive to include global, transnational, national, regional, and local histories as well as recognize the complexity of the sociotechnical systems in which trust and safety operates.
~A. -- Amanda Menking, Ph.D. (she/her) | Research & Programs | Trust and Safety Foundation <https://trustandsafetyfoundation.org/> | Calendly <https://calendly.com/amanda_tsf>