Safe Space: Talking Trust & Safety with Jerrel Peterson

From social work to social networks online, Jerrel Peterson, Director of Content Policy at Spotify and former Twitter alum, takes us on his unexpected journey into Trust & Safety. Thorn's VP of Strategic Impact, John Starr, talks with Peterson about his fascinating transition from aspiring plastic surgeon to social worker, and ultimately to a content policy expert bringing a unique perspective to online safety.

Jerrel explores the crucial role of "soft skills" in Trust & Safety and how he approaches leading teams through complex decision-making processes, balancing objectivity with organizational values in content moderation. He tackles the misconception that Trust & Safety operates in isolation and offers valuable insights into making it an essential requirement for platform success.

Transcript

John Starr (00:00):
So, we're at TrustCon and I'm here with Jerrell Peterson, the Director of Content Policy at Spotify. Jerrell, welcome to TrustCon, are you excited for the week?

Jerrel Peterson (00:11):
I really am. TrustCon is a lot. It's a lot of people so I'm pacing myself and just a lot of hugs, a lot of smiles already this morning and so, yeah, looking forward, it's always a good time.

John Starr (00:22):
Well, I really appreciate you joining me today. We're going to talk trust and safety.

Jerrel Peterson (00:26):
Okay.

John Starr (00:27):
We're not going to dive into specific trust and safety outcomes or talk the merits of current regulation in the world. I'm really interested in highlighting the humans that make up the space, that helped create trust and safety. And so, we're going to focus a lot on your journey, about your experience. And I think, whether or not you are a trust and safety pro or maybe you're looking to get into the field, I hope that you find this really, really useful and helpful. So, Director of Content Policy at Spotify, give us a two or three minute commercial on the day to day for you. What does that mean in reality?

Jerrel Peterson (01:17):
Yeah. So, in reality, my team is responsible for researching and writing the rules that govern the content that's on a given platform, that's what content policy means generally. And so, a lot of times, we are looking at the abuse trends in the industry, we are looking at the new experiences that we're creating on the platform and really thinking through how they could go wrong, how they could be misused, what kinds of harms are created. Our team exists primarily to minimize the potential for offline harm but there's lots of other kinds of harms too that are somewhat subjective.

(01:48):
And so, my team is thinking about reputational, financial, emotional harms as well and writing about it and trying to help the business think differently about what our role should be and getting them to move in a direction that supports business goals but also keeps people safe because those things are intertwined and the business isn't successful without having trust and safety as the cornerstone. So, that's the TL;DR there and I spent a lot of my time meeting with stakeholders, getting them bought in on this work and excited about this work.

John Starr (02:18):
Very cool. So, how does one get to this role? So, we're going to get to that a little bit. So, we have a former colleague, Sinead McSweeney, shout out to Sinead. She did a TED talk which talks about...She talks about her journey and the question that we're all asked as young people of what do you want to do when you grow up. And she actually talks about how that is becoming potentially outdated because the roles that are available, as Director of Content Policy at Spotify, didn't exist when we were growing up. And so, we started with where you're at now, let's go back. What did Jerrell want to do when he was growing up?

Jerrel Peterson (03:06):
I wanted to be a plastic surgeon.

John Starr (03:10):
Wow.

Jerrel Peterson (03:11):
If I'm being honest, that was the thing.

John Starr (03:13):
Tell me more about that.

Jerrel Peterson (03:13):
I wanted to be a doctor first, that was a big thing. And my mom has videos of me talking about wanting to be a doctor and be a physician and I did internships at Johns Hopkins, in the emergency department trying to desensitize myself to blood and all of that stuff. I was like, "This is what I'm going to do, get comfortable with it and make sure it's what you really, really, really want." I got to college and I liked chemistry, I liked lab and bio but I didn't like it as much as the other folks who were sitting next to me, they had a lot more passion for it. And I had this whole thing about dropping out of pre-med and all of that stuff and figuring out where I would go and I had a really amazing counselor who sat me down and I was crying, I was a mess.

(03:53):
He was just like, "After hearing your story, you sound like a helper. There are a lot of people who need a lot of help right now. Have you ever thought about the health professions? Have you ever thought about therapy? Have you thought about social work?" I was just like, "No, but I'll look at it, I'll look into it." And that's where I started, I started as a social worker.

John Starr (04:11):
Helper.

Jerrel Peterson (04:12):
Mm-hmm.

John Starr (04:12):
Super powerful. So, you mentioned you started as a social worker, give some context. We're going to spend a little bit of time here, give some context of your entry point into social work. What was that like for you and how was that transition from what you wanted to be when you grew up into maybe what you were meant to be?

Jerrel Peterson (04:35):
Yeah. It was hard if I'm going to be honest. I felt like I was letting my family down by not becoming a physician and being that person that folks to call on when there was a problem. But the other context at the time is, when I graduated from undergrad, the economy had tanked, there were no jobs anyway at that time. And so, unless you could afford to live for free in another state with the hope that you might be converted into a full-time role, that was really what was out there. And my family is not independently wealthy, I'm first generation to go to college, all that stuff so there was no safety net waiting for me but there was always social work jobs, there are always helping profession out there. Anywhere you look around the world, there's always the folks who help. And when I moved back home, those jobs are right there waiting for me.

(05:24):
And so, I started my career working with, really, any vulnerable population you could think about. Low-income families, seniors, people with severe mental illness and feeling unprepared for that work and then showing up and having the spirit of, if not me, then who. And we can talk more about the parallels with trust and safety but limited resources, people don't really know what you do, you're tackling problems and challenges that have not been solved. Despite all the advances, there are still people who are poor, there are still people who struggle for food and for housing. And it's not because of just poor social skills and all of that stuff, there are systems and structures that need to change and people are going to be better. And I found my calling and I was like, "I can do this. I can engage with folks and I can really help them think about their lives differently and make sense of the world and navigate it in ways that help them achieve their goals."

(06:15):
So, I did that for a really, really long time and I hit a ceiling a little bit, I would say. I don't know if you have social workers in your universe but a lot of folks that do that work realize that the people who make decisions about what gets funded, about what programs you shine a light on, in most cases, never had to worry about food or healthcare or education. And so, I was like, "Well, I'm going to be that voice. I'm going to take what I was seeing on the ground and apply it to more macro systems and represent the people who aren't in the room." And I did that for a while and I worked for a few national nonprofits that brought me out to California essentially and then I got laid off. And I was in this moment where like, "Oh, I found my calling, I'm great at what I'm doing, now what?"

John Starr (06:55):
Now what.

Jerrel Peterson (06:55):
And a friend was like, "You should think about tech. You're in San Francisco, why isn't that on your radar? Or why aren't you thinking about trust and safety?" And I was like, "What is trust and safety?"

John Starr (07:04):
So, let's maybe take a beat here because I think this is a really interesting moment in time for you perhaps as well. So, when you are in this helping profession as a social worker, it sounds like really entrenched in the helping profession, did you know about trust and safety? You mentioned tech wasn't on your radar but this concept of helper does pull through, I think, at least from my experience, to trust and safety pros. When did you understand that that was a possibility or in the atmosphere for you?

Jerrel Peterson (07:48):
It was conversations with folks in the industry because, before I threw my hat in, the way my anxiety is set up, I like to know what I'm getting myself into. So, I did a lot of informational interviews with folks doing the work to hear what was their day-to-day like, what do they love about their job, what do they hate about it and a lot of them were there for altruistic reasons. They want the internet to be better than what it was but I did not know what trust and safety was. And then, on recollection, I had had lots of encounters with issues online. I was on Myspace back in the day, Myspace was a wild place to be and we were all coding and managing our pages but there were so many people communicating with each other and there were many times I saw a content and I was just like, "Whoa, I had no idea this was even allowed on an online spaces."

(08:35):
And so, trust and safety was around me, I just never thought it was for me because I'm not technical. And I think a lot of people outside of tech assume that everyone who works here has a degree, can write SQL, is focused on engineering and building systems, I couldn't build anything. And the fun fact too about starting at Twitter, I didn't even have a Twitter account on the job when I started. I was that far removed from tech generally and, yeah, in a lot of ways, I was in the right place at the right time and my skills really, really carried me.

John Starr (09:04):
So, talk to me about the right place in the right time, what does that ... Obviously, you went on to work at Twitter, talk about that right place and right time for you. What was that role for you and what was that entry point? What was your first this is trust and safety moment?

Jerrel Peterson (09:29):
My first trust and safety moment. I think, for me, it was that my healthy skepticism of technology and online spaces was a value add and I didn't think that going in.

John Starr (09:42):
Love that.

Jerrel Peterson (09:43):
A lot of trust and safety teams have what they call product trust and so a product trust are the proactive arm of T&S. They're out there meeting product managers and engineers, helping them identify the risk before the feature launches and, to be good at that, you have to be skeptical of what it can do. And that's hard because a PM comes in, they're like, "My feature's going to be amazing. It's going to change the world, it's going to make so much money for our platform," and you're there like, "Well, it could also hurt a lot of people too and we have a track record of that." And so, that skepticism like, "Oh, I love this feature, it sounds like a lot of fun but here's all the ways that I think it could go bad and here's why I'm scared of it." That was my entry point, I was like, "Oh, I can do this."

(10:23):
And then my other "aha" moment was the soft skills. Again, I had a lot of imposter syndrome when I joined and I didn't think that social workers belonged in this space. And I was like, "Any moment, someone's going to come to me and be like, 'Ah, you had a good run, this was your time, you squandered it, you lost, thank you so much.'"

John Starr (10:39):
Game over.

Jerrel Peterson (10:39):
But then a lot of the success and the way I stood apart in those early days were my soft skills, collaboration. If there was any kind of group coming together to think about solving a complex challenge, put Jerrel on it, he's really good at building relationships, he's really good at taking complex information and translating it for lots of folks and that comes from social work, it really, really does. We do that, social workers do that every single day.

John Starr (11:02):
I think I might've been one of the people who was like, "Let's put Jerrel on that."

Jerrel Peterson (11:05):
Mm-hmm.

John Starr (11:07):
You're completely right on the soft skill component of it. So, you go in and are you feeling like you're at home? Do you feel like ... Obviously, you went from this journey, and home might be too strong, but you went from this journey of this helping profession, did it immediately feel like you could add value and how has that evolved through your time and trust and safety?

Jerrel Peterson (11:39):
Yeah. The answer is no.

John Starr (11:40):
Okay.

Jerrel Peterson (11:41):
I would say it wasn't until almost a year two, if I'm being honest, where I felt like I had found my voice in the space and what differentiated me as a worker but also as a future leader. I knew I really wanted to be a people manager in that space, I wanted to grow folks in this industry. And it wasn't until I had the opportunity to do that where I'm like, "Not only am I adding value in helping products shift and keeping people safe and managed complex escalations but I also had a lot of folks who look up to me and feel like they have a place in this industry because they worked on my team," and it was something that I totally did not expect at all. And once I found that, I joke with my folks, I'm like, "They're going to have to drag me out of it now because I'm in it now. I really, really am."

John Starr (12:29):
Yeah, yeah. I think you've built a strong sense of community in the roles that you've had. I think you talked about an aha moment, those in trust and safety also always have an, "oh, no" moment. Was there an, "oh, no" moment that you can reference of being like, "Oh, oh, wow, this is real."?

Jerrel Peterson (12:50):
Yeah, a lot of them. So, working on social media platforms, they are always on, and I think we know that in concept and in theory. But Del Harvey has a really great TED talk from years ago where she talks about scale and she has this line where it's like, "If Twitter has 500 million tweets a day and there's a one in a million chance that something really bad is happening, that means, on that platform, something really bad is happening all the time." And for me, I would go home and I always thought I had really healthy boundaries with work. Somebody that do social work a lot, you can't burn yourself out and there were a few times I went home and I'm like, "Oh, because I'm done, that does not mean the platform is done or things are done." And there was that moment of like, "Oh, no, am I ready to sustain myself?" And then I'm not sure if you remember this-

John Starr (13:43):
Go on.

Jerrel Peterson (13:44):
... but we had a conversation in passing and it was something bad that day or probably a lot of things bad that day. And you saw my face, I must've just looked really, really tired or burned out or whatever and you pulled me aside and you were like, "Success in this space is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't burn yourself out now." And it's something I say to my folks to this day and it's a good reminder. And again, the social work, I had those skills when I came but you reminding me of that and I was like, "Oh, I actually can do this. I can take my time and have progress over time."

John Starr (14:18):
It's true, this space is always on. I remember a time, and perhaps you even worked on this, when there was ... Something bad happened at 3:00 AM East Coast time and it was one of these things where I think I went into a meeting with representatives of regions of the world that experienced this and I made the mistake of saying, "Oh, it was a perfect storm of bad timing." And they said, "Well, your perfect storm of bad timing is 3:00 in the afternoon for us." And it hit me very square, this is very early on Twitter, very squarely that it's a ... The internet is global, fast and humans have expectations as it relates to platforms and how they're going to operate. So, for me, it was just immediately this concept of an always-on platform.

(15:16):
I'm interested to get your sense of, I haven't met anyone in trust and safety that's like, "Figured it out, we're perfect." What's a way that you would like to see the space get maybe 5% better, 8% better?

Jerrel Peterson (15:37):
I think, for me, leaning more into the concept that trust and safety teams support the business. I think, when I started, I've always thought about them as separate and, in some cases, in opposition of each other. That trust and safety teams slow things down or we're a cost center or we are the sad path and no one wants to engage with us when that's not the case. So much research shows that, when folks are experiencing abuse online, when they witness it, they are less likely to log in, they're less likely to engage, they're less likely to post, less likely do all the things that the platforms want them to do, it's a business imperative to do trust and safety well and to invest in it and, for me, getting comfortable with that. Because I think, also, social work training but also social justice is radical, anti-capitalist and that kind of stuff.

John Starr (16:24):
Right, right, right.

Jerrel Peterson (16:25):
But the platforms do a lot better when they are leaning into these issues and solving them. And I want to make sure that folks who are coming in with these ideas about how the systems need to change and context of all the bad things that have happened also know that doing their jobs well helps the platform be better. And maybe, maybe there will be some days where it's like, "Oh, this platform is great because it has differentiated itself from a safety perspective, I trust them. I'm not worried about how they're using my information, I really get it." That's what keeps me optimistic about the future.

John Starr (16:57):
Love that. So, there may be a young social worker listening, maybe even a aspiring plastic surgeon.

Jerrel Peterson (17:07):
Okay, okay.

John Starr (17:09):
Potentially an artist, people may not know you're an incredible artist. What would be your piece of advice for a young person curious about the field that we work in who's maybe in the field of social work that's interested in exploring it or maybe would like a career like you have? What would you say to them?

Jerrel Peterson (17:41):
I would, of course, tell them to go for it and there's a huge community of folks like me with non-traditional backgrounds. It's been interesting, since I went to TrustCon last year, how many more social workers I've met in this space and there's a lot of them.

John Starr (17:56):
There's a lot, yeah.

Jerrel Peterson (17:57):
And a lot of them are executives too, VP level social workers. We don't all put MSW behind our names on LinkedIn but we're out there so there's a community of folks there. But also, I think the biggest learning lesson for me is a lot of folks are just figuring it out. They're doing the best they can with the information and the resources they have available and their practitioners, they've got skills and they're focused but you're not missing out on something, you're not missing that thing. You've got it inside of you already and the people you admire are doing the best they can. They're not like, "Oh, I got this. My job is easy, I can do it every day." They are figuring it out and they're trying to align folks around the vision to keep moving forward. And anybody can do that and be confident that you can do that.

John Starr (18:40):
Very well said. What is the most misunderstood part about our work or about the humans that do the work?

Jerrel Peterson (18:51):
That everything we do happens in a vacuum. And this is something I misunderstood as well. People are like, "Oh, Jerrel, you lead content policy," and they're like, "The policy is so important, just change it, that'll make everything better. Just write something new." And for me, I'm like, "Yes, and I cannot do this work alone." And now, I'm very, very proud of the policies I've worked on, I'm very proud of the teams and the stuff that they have built but our fancy little Google Doc does not change the materiality of the people who use the respective platforms that I've worked on. It just, they don't, it really, really doesn't.

(19:28):
We need to engage with engineers, product managers, comms, legal, partners, PR, all of those folks working together actually improves the experience for folks. So, when I get that question why not just change the policy, I'm like, "Great, let's change it right now. Do you feel better?"

John Starr (19:43):
Now what?

Jerrel Peterson (19:44):
No.

John Starr (19:44):
Right, yeah.

Jerrel Peterson (19:44):
We've got to align people around that vision. I think that's something that I've done really, really well and lead into and my team does really well as well.

John Starr (19:50):
Talk to me a little bit about this because I find it compelling and I can relate to a certain extent about the ... I think you frame them soft skills. And for those of you who haven't worked inside of at least a version of a tech company that I've worked inside, they tend to, and this is generally speaking, tend to skew fast, tend to skew data driven, tend to skew just very ship it. And this idea of bringing people along of slowing down to speed up but still going pretty damn fast and really, really educating and bringing the company along with, honestly, concepts that weren't openly talked about in the public discourse until five, six, seven years ago. I remember having to literally go around the company and bringing them up to speed.

(21:11):
You did a fantastic job of bringing the organization up to speed about what different harm vectors are, how you and your team or we thought about them and what operationally was the response to them and why it wasn't this or they talked about this idea of it being a vacuum, the scale that it's working at. There was an important part, point in time of the trust and safety history that I feel like we got an influx, it went ... Well, speaking very frankly, it went from a Twitter, a cost center to the strategy of the company in a matter of a year.

Jerrel Peterson (21:56):
Health team, yeah.

John Starr (21:57):
Yeah. So, it give us sense of, when you say soft skills, can you give a little color on what you mean by that and why it's so important?

Jerrel Peterson (22:11):
Well, there's a lot to say about that. For me, the soft skills part is important because most trust and safety teams are not in a position to say no. And when you can't say no, you can't really stop the train when it is going so the soft skills become important, specifically how do you get folks to think differently about their work. And so, influence strategies really, really matter and these are things that I picked up when I was doing public policy work. When I was doing social work, I couldn't change the law itself but I could change how people thought about it or what their agency was as they're navigating these really complex systems that they didn't create. And so, one thing one of my old mentors would say is that you can be a leader out in front or you can lead from the wings. And that's something I got really, really good at under your leadership but there's also lots of other incredible managers that I've had in tech and they know who they are and I thank them all the time for it.

(23:04):
But being comfortable with that, once the train is moving really quickly and you're in this meeting and it's we need to stop this or when someone says something smart and I Slack them on the side, that's really, really smart and that connects to the shared vision that we have and that's enough. And then when we have a one-on-one or a coffee, they're like, "Well, how was your day?" "My day is great. Here's what I'm thinking about now that we are moving forward." Those things, how do you help people think about their work differently and see you as a collaborator and a stakeholder. And I think, in tech, I was it's my job to stand out and show myself but, again, my superpower was collaboration and getting a lot of people to be aligned on one vision and I was very, very surprised at the kind of stuff we can accomplish when we do that. And I brought that to my role now and that's definitely something I'm going to take with me going forward.

John Starr (23:47):
I love that. So, of course, at Thorn, we build technical solutions, we're very focused on, I would say, a really important but a component of the large swath of online harms. How do you think about staffing or preparing your team to capture the different really important expertise within this ever-growing list of harms or adversary trust and safety matters?

Jerrel Peterson (24:26):
For me, I always look for folks who are curious. Healthy skepticism is also important. I started at the beginning, that's what, I think, added value for me, healthy skepticism but also curious. You see something that is happening or you're aware of what's going on in our industry and you start to think, well, what could we do about that or how does that impact us and they start to write or they start to do something with it. I have a lot of folks who are like, "I do operations or I do marketing, I want to jump into policy," and they're surprised when I tell them that we write a lot. We're always writing and we're always researching, we're always thinking deeply about things. So, that curiosity, I think really, really goes a long way.

(25:03):
But then I also look for folks who really want to do the work because it's work, it really, really is. And you've used pros, I like practitioners too. We are practitioners, we're not just do-gooders. Being influential requires skills, skills that you can practice and can get good at over the time. Getting a business to think differently about what it does means you have to understand their budgets and how they finance things. How we ask for resources, head counts, partnerships, all of that stuff requires some knowledge and not just this is great, we should do it, it takes a bit more than that. So, comfortably doing the work but also being curious, I think it's incredibly important especially right now because the technology is moving so, so fast.

John Starr (25:40):
Yeah. One of the things that I think is really ... That folks may not understand fully about, especially folks on the policy side or operational side of trust and safety, is oftentimes, it was certainly the case with Twitter, is that they're having to enforce things, rules that may be on content that they, at best, don't agree with, at worst, they personally find insulting or worse. I'm curious to give a sense of ... I think that to me is one thing that I would love for humans to know about those that work in trust and safety. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what it's like to lead a team that is having to weigh things generally day to day from an objective point of view and having to work within this environment of multiple responses to things?

Jerrel Peterson (26:57):
Yeah. It's hard and it's a thankless field in a lot of ways. And not because people don't like us, they just don't know what we do. We're not actually just twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to text us something really bad, we're always on in a lot of ways especially when we're in the office or in front of our computer. I think, for me, there've been a few things that guide me. One of them is bias toward understanding and not agreement. Because the complexity of our work, when you ask 20 experts globally what should we do about a particular piece of content, you're going to get a lot of opinions and they don't always agree right now, and I'm fine with that. But I want you to understand what we're doing, what are the trade-offs that we're making? Charlotte, executive director of TSPA, says trust and safety trade-offs to sadness, right?

John Starr (27:46):
Yeah, yeah.

Jerrel Peterson (27:47):
We can talk about the sadness part later but the trade-offs piece is real. And so, when you help folks understand what you're solving for and the trade-offs that you're making, they may not agree, but you can have much more productive conversations about where we're going when everyone's on the same page especially engineers and PMs. They're so innovative and creative, when we give them a challenge and why we got this challenge and where we're hoping to get, they come with lots of ideas for how we can get it even if they don't agree where we are. And so, when folks are angry, I'm like, "That's a good place to start. How do we translate that energy into excitement?" And then for motivating my people, what motivates me is I know where we're going.

(28:23):
I think the things that happen every single day can really beat you down but I know what we're working towards. And for me, that's always inspired me to think seven to 10 years, not just what's happening in front of us. And as a leader, I think a lot of ways you can show up by aligning folks around the vision and the values even if you don't have an answer. And on purpose, I'll not give the right answer even if I know because I'm like, "Here's what we are solving for, run with that and maybe we might get to a solution that I can imagine or anticipated or we might get to something better too."

John Starr (28:57):
Love that. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about that I didn't hit on?

Jerrel Peterson (29:02):
Not necessarily. I think we covered it, all of it. Social workers should be everywhere. You belong in tech, definitely.

John Starr (29:08):
Indeed. So, Jerell, thank you so much for joining. You are an incredibly hardworking and interesting person and I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you very much for joining us.

Jerrel Peterson (29:24):
I'm glad that you had me. Really, really appreciate it. Always. Anything for you, John.