The Safety Triforce

Triforce > Triangle

I call this my (mostly) monthly newsletter because some months I forget to post and other months I have something more to say. February is one such month... of the latter not the former.

Let’s talk about safety.

The Trust and Safety Triangle

If you run in Trust and Safety circles, you may have been in a conversation or two (or a hundred) about the “Trust and Safety Triangle”, the metaphorical push and pull we navigate with policy and product development to balance privacy, safety, and self-expression (for a great overview of said triangle, check out this episode of Safety is Sexy with Alice Hunsberger).

I have spent many an hour thinking about this triangle, particularly in regards to preserving the right to self expression, as this the crucial part of the triangle that includes “where the magic happens” so-to-say in games. At least for me, the power of games has always been centered on its ability to allow the player to be who they want, when they want, and the freedom to change who they want to be, and when they want to be it, as they want (though both character creation and social community). …I think that sentence sounded better in my head. But I digress.

Spending many an hour thinking about this triangle has me thinking about a potentially new, tangential triangle: the [how do you build and sustain] Safety Triforce (working title).

The Safety Triangle Triforce

Unlike the original metaphorical triangle, this one is not constantly shifting trying to achieve equilateral-um… (is that a word? Probably not). Instead, it functions more like a triforce, with each piece - policy, tooling, and education - reinforcing the others to form a unified whole (i.e., safety on digital platforms).

Now, in the gaming industry, we have a pretty good idea of what the policy and tooling components of this triforce should look like. Over the last fifty years, we have seen basic safety policies (such as community guidelines) and safety tooling (who doesn’t love an ol’ block, mute, and report) come to be integrated and somewhat standardized across the industry. On top of that, in recent years we have started to see a reinvigorated effort to refine these policies and innovate on pre-existing tooling (shout out to Riot, Epic, and Activision to name a few).

However, for the last point of the triangle, education (which is obviously the Wisdom piece of the triforce?) …there is a lot of room to grow.

Questing for Wisdom: Digital Literacy Education

A few months ago, I published a newsletter titled “Where are all the Digital Literacy Programs?”. In this newsletter, I discussed the role of school programs, parental advocacy, and other top down approaches for promoting digital literacy en mass. Historically, this has been the most common approach. Knowing that children turn to parents and teachers for digital literacy education, and that parents and educators feel under equipped to have these conversations, the decision to focus on large-scale, broad solutions to the piecemeal, unsystematic way in which digital literacy continues to be approached in these traditional spaces has seemed like the clearest path forward.

These large-scale, blue sky initiatives are undoubtedly important (pretty sure my slogan suggestion of “Only you can… prevent disinformation from crumbling democracy” has some legs to it), population wide approaches are not the only way forward. The truth is, there is a lot of room to innovate with targeted, bottom-up, community-specific approaches.

Re-scaling the problem in my mind then had me thinking about how digital literacy innovation (so-to-say) would or could apply to the communities I am most entrenched in - the communities in and around games. Specifically, I started to think about what digital literacy initiatives would look like if we created them for community leadership in game and game-adjacent spaces.

We know that moderators and community managers play a pivotal role in maintaining safe (and fun!) spaces in gaming and other digital communities. For example, did you know that community guidelines are a stronger predictor of lower rates of disruption than moderation efforts? That is, community guidelines set by community leadership are more influential in setting the tone and nature of a community than punitive punishment. That is the power of community managers and moderators.

However, on the other side of this moderators and community managers report feeling underprepared to handle the complexities of managing online spaces, particularly when addressing issues such as harassment and user mental health crises.

So taking all of this together, I started to think about how we could start to pull the wisdom shard of the triforce more into the fold without getting lost in the Great Sea (IYKYK).

…alright this analogy is getting confusing now. Let me try again.

All of this got me thinking about what the first steps might look like to expand our efforts in the educational piece of the safety triforce and specifically, how we could start to approach digital literacy initiatives for community leadership in games as strategy for improving safety and developing resiliency for them and their communities.

It starts with prioritizing educational resources as part of proactive trust and safety.

Bottom-up, education based community trust and safety efforts are a vast, largely untapped area for innovation. How can we use education as a tool to develop resilient player communities? That is, communities with effective policy, tooling, and access to the education and information needed to effectively leverage the policy and tooling within the product to minimize exposure to harms in the first place, facilitate the development of communities with healthy norms (i.e., norms with lower rates of disruption), and the ability to withstand and recover quickly from disruptions.

Educational efforts should start with community leaders (but they are not the only important audience)

There are different audiences that are in need of digital literacy resources, each of them needing a slightly different approach. Just as an example, the digital literacy resources needed to answer the age old question of “How much is too much screen time” could look like a magic number to parents (there is no magic number, but that doesn’t keep parents from asking for one), a checklist of warning signs for teenagers, and/or behavioral or verbal markers to community managers and moderators. All audiences need to be reached, but if we want to move the needle forward, I think we need to first focus our efforts on the audience we are most equipped to reach - community leaders in the social spaces of games.

As mentioned above, moderators and community managers play a pivotal role in maintaining the culture of gaming communities, but it often comes at a cost. Research highlights alarmingly high rates of psychological distress and secondary trauma for individuals in community management roles. Many moderators also report feeling underprepared to handle the complexities of managing online spaces. Building out education and resources tailored for this group could help mitigate some of these harms as well as better prepare moderators and community managers to more effectively navigate the challenges they face, by providing access to a centralized repository of tools, resources, and educational content.

Not only is this good for them, this is good for the community as a whole because yes, structured support and proactive education will directly translate into safer online spaces. (As mentioned above, research has found that well developed, actionable community guidelines (which are often determined by the moderator or community manager of the space are a stronger predictor of the rates of hateful language on a server than moderation efforts alone.)

Now I know this, and you know this, and anyone who has read the report knows this. But imagine what it would mean to take that research and transform it into an educational module on how to create effective community guidelines and make them available (at scale) to moderators and community managers? I think it would translate into some really powerful proactive community building efforts.

Disseminate this information at a smaller scale, across our collective corners of the digital landscape.

This last part is where the whole “it takes a village” comes in. While trust and safety innovation largely happens in silos, digital literacy education does not have to. In fact, it really shouldn’t. A high tide raises all ships, and having resources and education for players about how to engage in these spaces, how to build resiliency to disruptions, how to understand the policy and use the tools at hand, are universally beneficial across studio, platform, and space. However, we need to reframe our goals away from “EVERYONE ALL AT ONCE” and focus on our individual corners of the digital landscape. I cannot get a PSA across Cartoon Network tomorrow, but I can write a newsletter sharing my thoughts and ideas across my network of game and game-adjacent trust and safety advocates.

Moving Forward

So where do we go from here? “Digital literacy” has become such a catch all, aspirational ideal that I think we have lost sight of how we can be operationalizing it and promoting it within our individual spaces and communities at a smaller scale. So let’s rally our collective thoughts and minds and start thinking about what this kind of work can look like, how we can work together, and where we should start.

I am happy to say that from the time I started writing this blog post until now there has been an announcement that this kind of work is already starting in one corner of the digital landscape. This month, Discord announced they are developing resources for moderators and community managers around these topics. If you are a community minded individual (which, if you made it to the conclusion I imagine you are…), one small step forward would be to share your thoughts in the survey and share with your community. Today, it is one corner of the world. Tomorrow, world domination… er, a brighter and safer (digital) tomorrow.

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Other places you can find my musings…

• Personal Website, for more about my research and upcoming events. Which I recently updated! Take a look if you haven’t been there in a while (#OpenToWork)

• Psychgeist, my YouTube channel dedicated to the science of digital games. New videos are released sporadically on Wednesdays and if you aren’t a subscriber yet, please click that link and hit that big red button. Subscribing is FREE and is the easiest way to support my work by increasing engagement and making the algorithm happy.

• BlueSky, for those who have migrated over

• LinkedIn, if that is more your style

• Most Recent Save Podcast, go ahead, give it a like. I promise you’ll love it.