Companies maintain a diversity of T&S professionals that specialize in intelligence and investigations. These individuals range from providing geopolitical analysis, conducting privacy assessments, and deep-diving into on-platform risks. While these practitioners are scattered across multiple verticals, they all contribute to mitigating risk for the entire company through their respective specialities. This panel session seeks to introduce the latest chapter of TSPA’s Curriculum ”Investigations, Intelligence, and Risk Mitigation” for the APAC audience. Panelists will be comprised of investigative and intelligence professionals who have experienced mitigating integrity-specific risks in APAC. These panelists will be given an opportunity to share how the APAC region presented unique challenges to their investigations and how their regional expertise have delivered impact. Attendants will be introduced to the contents of the chapter, including the end-to-end cycles of investigative work and measurements of success.

In recent years, the domain of Trust & Safety has witnessed remarkable growth. Presently, T&S professionals engage in a range of responsibilities, including content moderation, product development, quality assurance, policy implementation among other tasks. The session will talk about professionals in T&S in APAC countries and real-life experiences and activities that can help nurture career growth in T&S.

Online platform regulation is creating a global wave of change, with the European Union (EU) and the Asia Pacific (APAC) region at the forefront. Our panel will delve into the regulatory convergence and divergence between the EU and APAC, exploring the implications for services operating across these regions. The question-of-the-hour to answer is: Do services active in both regions face two widely disparate regulatory silos?    

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A lot has been written about government censorship, and the need for tech companies to do better when it comes to protecting online speech is widely discussed. But what happens when the two collide and tech companies are faced with external pressures to remove content that they may not want to? What are the goals, considerations and tumbling blocks that pave the path towards rights-respecting content moderation? In this presentation, we will explore the human and organizational side of decision-making when the stakes are high and tech companies are faced with the pressure to “censor”, and take you through potential options to tackle this conundrum using risk-based methodology.

The rise of the internet and social media has amplified the issue of online hate speech globally. This is particularly concerning in regions like Singapore and Southeast Asia due to their vast linguistic and cultural diversity. Though machine learning and deep learning offer potential solutions, their effectiveness is limited by the region's unique challenges, including language diversity and cultural nuances. For a comprehensive solution, a collaborative approach is essential. This involves governments, social media platforms, and researchers joining forces to tackle the problem. The talk advocates for such collaborations, emphasizing data sharing, region-specific AI models, and stringent regulatory frameworks. In essence, the focus is on addressing the urgent need to combat online hate speech in Singapore and Southeast Asia to ensure a safe digital environment.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have gained in popularity, the importance of ensuring the safety of such models has also received unprecedented attention. However, the frontline workers doing the safety work have often been left out of the public discourse. To better understand the experience of AI Safety Trainers, and specifically how it may be similar to or different from content moderator (CoMos) experience, my team conducted in-depth interviews with 10 Trainers from 2 different workflows. The study revealed 3 major differences as well as 4 main similarities between AI Safety Trainers’ and CoMos’ experience. Based on these findings, we proposed wellness best practices for AI Safety Trainers, specifically when they may need interventions above and beyond what is usually offered for content moderation. This talk will cover the major findings from the research study as well as our recommendations on how to best support our frontline ensuring AI safety.

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Despite the ongoing challenge of addressing online child sexual exploitation (OSCE) in the Asia Pacific region, the efforts to combat it continue to face the shortage of investment and workforce support from the global companies operating here. With AI being a “buzzword” in the world of Trust & Safety, there is a risk it will simultaneously become a relied-upon solution and an exacerbating factor in the fight against OSCE in the region. This situation raises concerns that the unique characteristics and abuse patterns may go unaddressed, as they are overlooked in algorithms trained on non-representative datasets. This presentation will explore sociocultural and environmental factors that influence the proliferation of OSCE and consider how they might impact the deployment of generalised algorithmic solutions aimed at countering this problem.

What does it mean to be an expert in Trust & Safety today? How do you become and remain an expert? How do you maximize learning and growth in your career? Conventional answers to these questions are insufficient when you work with constant change and where knowledge becomes obsolete quickly. The way we grew in the past isn’t the way we need to grow in our careers today. We need to be hyper-learners who can adapt to changing environments. In this session we will look at newer approaches to developing expertise and career growth, including ability to learn and adapt, comfort with ambiguity, stress-testing beliefs, and responding to challenges.

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GPay India serves millions of users daily , which makes us a target for scaled fraud attacks. Proactively preventing frauds at scale with high accuracy becomes critical to maintain safety as well as smooth user experience. This is a particularly complex problem to solve, especially due to the adversarial nature of fraud patterns and very limited labeled data unlike other machine learning problems. One of the ways we solve it in Gpay India, is through a graph based machine learning platform, to prevent repeat offenders from onboarding/transacting on the system. The presentation will discuss about : (1) Designing fraud mitigation enforcements using a large scale graph while also solving for tail end false positives to avoid any good users getting impacted (2) Case study on proactive loss mitigation from fraud ring attacks (3) Designing a feedback loop for continuous model improvement (4) User journey of proactive warnings/nudges to the users while transacting basis graph insights

Trust & Safety policies tend to be concerned with the well-being of those content moderators who are exposed to severe content violations. However, most moderators review content across a broad severity spectrum ranging from benign to egregious. Given that perceptions of content severity among moderators are yet to be fully understood, this study used a sequential design to qualitatively peruse the views of 34 moderators in the US and the Philippines alongside those of 166 support professionals (mental health, learning experience, and team lead staff) in relation to content severity and its perceived impact on moderators’ well-being and job accuracy. Thematic analyses of data revealed two overarching themes. In the first theme of ‘perceived content categories’, both moderators and support professionals broadly distinguished between ‘moderate’ and ‘graphic’ content. Under the second theme of ‘content impact on moderator’s well-being’, a majority of participants attributed more detrimental effects to working with moderate content on well-being and job accuracy than to reviewing graphic content, largely due to the lack of wellness support and care offered to moderate content queues. This study, in lending voice to both moderators and support professionals’ observations, offers participant-led recommendations for work policy and future research.

Singapore is one of the first countries in APAC and the world to introduce regulations to ensure designated Social Media Services take preventive measures to ensure online safety. In this presentation, the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) will share the features of Singapore’s recently-passed online safety regulation and Code of Practice for Online Safety. IMDA will also share our considerations when developing the regulation to fit Singapore’s unique social and cultural context, our co-regulatory and multi-stakeholder approach as well as the lessons from our operationalization journey so far.

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The relationship between social media platforms and governments is complex, but can be especially tenuous in the Asia-Pacific region where online threats often pose immediate, real-life dangers. Undue government involvement in content moderation practices can contribute to a climate of misinformation and censorship, affecting users’ rights to access information and freedom of expression. This session will begin to unpack some of these complexities and provide a forum to discuss lessons learned.    

A wave of regulation is sweeping APAC and there is a trend towards greater regulation of online harms. While the region has disparate laws, there are some recurring themes in how different countries in the region are tackling online harms. Are tech companies, particularly trust and safety professionals equipped to handle what is to come? Hear from our expert panelists as they give us an overview of the various emerging regulations, the similarities, opportunities and challenges ahead for trust and safety professionals in the region.    

This panel discussion will delve into the nuanced world of wellness strategies specifically designed for
moderation teams located in the APAC region. Comprising of psychologists and wellness leaders from
leading trust & safety BPO companies, the panel will explore the unique opportunities in promoting
wellness initiatives with cultural sensitivity.

Free and open source knowledge projects rely on a community of volunteers, who tirelessly work towards advancing knowledge and improving access to credible and truthful information. Such work, often with no monetary incentive, is made difficult by those in positions of power. Many APAC countries are unique in their socio-political context, with laws and practices targeting social activists and political opposition. The role, contribution and influence of the state and media in these countries impacts how communities contribute to open source and free knowledge projects, and the challenges that they face.

This presentation aims to discuss factors that make the creation and distribution of information disorders (mis and disinformation) in open source and free knowledge projects, a unique problem in the APAC region. It will also answer how these communities continue to build and maintain these projects, despite the antagonistic ecosystem around them.

Gaming is a rapidly growing industry with north of ~3 Billion gamers identified globally. As the lines between gaming and social continue to blur, one of the largest focus areas for the gaming industry will relate to trust & safety - everything from the infrastructure, consumer sentiment, the implications of the regulatory landscape, and fostering developer mindsets that enable safer, more privacy-responding, and fundamentally more inclusive games. Trust and Safety for gaming and platforms, however, is very different. Our presentation will share the shift in safety for gaming and how safety, privacy, and inclusivity must be core to game development and design. We will discuss: The growing symbiosis between gaming and social worlds, and the changing demographics of the gamer/player profile as users grow and game experiences cross age demographics and platforms. The challenges faced with in-game safety for experiences that play-out or stream in a live environment, which increases the very real risk of encountering real-time harm, and how innovative tech and design is tackling the problem How regulation and transparency reporting will increase visibility and accountability for gaming spaces that are safe for all, and the compliance implications if they do not Why safety-by-design for positive user experience will be the deciding factor in community loyalty and support as gaming continues to grow into new Web3 and spatial experiences.

It is important to recognise and address what happens to tenured content moderators who have been working for a significant number of years. In this light, we conducted an exploratory research study using psychometrically validated tools to compare attributes of resilience, satisfaction with life, and professional quality of life between 3 cohorts; new-hires (0-6 months), mid-tenured (7-18 months), and long tenured content moderators (18 months and above). Based on the findings of this research, we designed "Recharge Up", as a data-driven initiative to aide our long term tenured employees to re-orient their meaning-making skill as content moderators, addressing their purpose at work, and recognizing their contribution.    

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In the dynamic landscape of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, gaming scams have emerged as a concerning trend, coinciding with the remarkable rise in game app downloads. To safeguard the future of gaming and protect millions of players, a collaborative approach from various stakeholders is imperative. This proactive stance against gaming scams involves fostering cross-industry alliances between game developers, publishers, platforms, and payment providers, while also bolstering regulatory cooperation across APAC countries. Technological advancements, such as AI and ML integration, play a pivotal role in detecting and preventing scams in real-time. Furthermore, public awareness campaigns and streamlined reporting mechanisms serve to empower players and facilitate timely action against scammers. This united effort seeks to create a secure and resilient gaming ecosystem, nurturing trust and ensuring a thriving gaming experience across the APAC region.

The International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) developed “A Model Framework for Employers of Content Moderators: The First Line of Defense in Online Child Protection” (Model Framework) to support the wellness and resilience of human content moderators, thus supporting the trust and safety of online platforms and communities. The Model Framework is specifically designed for employers of human content moderators that encounter OCSE and CSAM in a nonlegal/law enforcement capacity.    

Clickbait malpractice poses a critical issue in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, demanding immediate attention. Publishers in APAC employ deceptive tactics, crafting sensational and misleading content with the sole purpose of driving clicks and ad revenue. This detrimental practice leads to a cascade of harmful consequences. Foremost, clickbait fuels misinformation by disseminating false or misleading information, negatively affecting public discourse and decision-making. It also results in wasted time and money for users who click on enticing but ultimately disappointing content. Additionally, clickbait can perpetrate ad fraud, generating fraudulent ad clicks that harm both the advertising industry and consumers. Furthermore, it erodes trust in publishers and online platforms, making it challenging for individuals to locate reliable information.The complexity of the APAC region, with its diverse languages and cultures, exacerbates the problem by making it challenging for publishers to create relevant, non-clickbait content for a wide audience, and for users to discern clickbait from genuine content. To combat this menace, Google Discover is employing advanced machine learning techniques to detect and combat clickbait, implementing actor-based strategies to identify and proactively block bad actors, and establishing country-specific policies and early warning systems. Nevertheless, the battle against clickbait persists as an uphill struggle, necessitating Google's ongoing commitment to ensuring a safe and reliable user experience.Beyond the outlined issues, clickbait's capacity to manipulate emotions, spread hate speech, and target vulnerable populations, including children, underscores its gravity. Furthermore, it can inflict significant damage on the reputations of businesses and organizations. Recognizing the severity of this issue is crucial to taking effective measures against clickbait malpractice.

Startups often focus on growth and innovation, but they may not have the resources or bandwidth to focus on trust and safety. Additionally, the fast-paced environment of a startup can make it difficult to build and maintain a safety culture. This session will present NAVER Z's journey of taking the company from a place with minimal awareness of trust and safety to an organization with a safety-by-design mindset. The session will delve into how the trust and safety team leveraged research, data-driven strategies, advocacy, and coalitions with safety partners to embed trust and safety culture throughout the organization despite challenges.

More T&S professionals are moving between industry and government, where they utilize the same skill sets such as crafting content policy and operational guidelines, perform content assessments, and have to weigh complex product, policy, ops and legal trade-offs in their daily work. They also have to deal with the mental health challenges that come with working on harmful content. Ultimately, both sides seek the same goal – to create a safer online space for users. This lightning talk will discuss why regulators should be considered T&S professionals too and how greater collaboration and knowledge sharing between regulators and industry can lead to better online safety outcomes.

Do you engage (or wished you engaged) with civil society? Or the insights they provide? Are you a civil society actor turned integrity professional? Victoire Rio has been coordinating civil society efforts to mitigate digital harms in Myanmar since 2016, and helping civil society across a range of high risk contexts globally get connected to companies. In this lightning talk, she’ll share her perspective on challenges, missed opportunities and ways forward to improve engagement and cross learning between civil society and the industry around trust and safety issues.    

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Five years ago, we launched the Japanese Trust&Safety Industry group with the belief that cross-industry collaboration is essential to make the Japanese internet a safer place. Since then, we have continued to grow and develop, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. I will share the background of the group’s launch, the lessons and challenges we have learned from our activities, and our vision for the future. If you are interested in creating a Trust&Safety industry group in your country, please join us!

India ranks second among the countries with the most internet users and is the biggest democracy in the world, Policy enforcement and moderation in Hindi and other regional languages has become a priority for most of the platforms as we have observed a rise in discriminatory and exclusionary online behaviors, leading to communalism and violent actions targeting Muslims in India. To gain insights into the proliferation of anti-Muslim rhetoric online, our investigation focused on identifying narratives, keywords and dangerous coordination on social media platforms, with the intent to share misleading content, incite fear, and call for violence. Understanding the trends surrounding misinformation and hate speech becomes all the more significant as the country gears up for its important elections in 2024. Being aware of the mechanisms through which such harmful narratives spread is essential for policymakers, tech companies, and society as a whole, as it can enable targeted interventions to curb the dissemination of misinformation and prevent the incitement of violence and discrimination.    

Human trafficking remains a pressing issue in APAC that violates the rights and dignity of millions of individuals. Addressing this multi-faceted problem demands collaborative efforts between various stakeholders, including non-governmental organizations, experts and specialized teams. In this session, we will share their partnership and strategies in the fight against human trafficking and child exploitation. Discover how the synergy between social responsibility and the global company expertise is driving meaningful impact and creating a safer world for vulnerable populations. Attendees can expect information about how platforms deal with human trafficking that will provide valuable insights into the opportunities for the Trust & Safety experts to work together.