Trust & Safety Landscape Evolves: Vendors Now Core to Online Platforms
The trust and safety landscape has witnessed significant evolution, with crucial implications for end users and platforms alike. This shift is driven by regulatory changes, technological advancements, and a growing ecosystem of external vendors and consultants.
The trust and safety field traces its roots back to the 1990s, with third-party vendors emerging in the 2000s to tackle the exponential increase in user-generated content. Initially, these vendors focused on labor outsourcing, such as data labeling and content review. However, the early 2020s brought rapid advancements in large language models and new online safety laws, altering the vendor landscape.
Today, vendors offer diverse services, categorized into identification, tooling, and expertise. They have moved beyond outsourced content moderation, playing a vital role in core trust and safety work. These vendors build infrastructure and modular tools that enable classification and structure the entire workflow. Even large players like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, who once relied on in-house solutions, now engage with third-party vendors. Specialized providers such as Hive, OpenAI, and Clarifai continue to influence the field, with some reducing their visibility or shifting focus.
The trust and safety vendor landscape has evolved significantly, with vendors now deeply enmeshed in all aspects of trust and safety at nearly every online platform. This evolution has crucial implications for the field as a whole and the end users who expect platforms to prevent, detect, and mitigate abuse. As regulatory compliance becomes a priority, vendors continue to adapt and innovate, shaping the practices, metrics, and goals of the trust and safety field.
