The Salesforce of Safety: Software Vendors as Infrastructural/Professional Nodes in Online Trust and Safety

As new online safety laws and advances in AI reshape digital markets, a new class of third-party software vendors has emerged offering platforms for managing trust and safety. This article examines how these vendors reshape platform governance not merely as secondary labor providers but as positioned actors in a social and professional field. Through interviews, fieldwork at an industry conference, and analysis of vendor texts, this study finds that these start-ups are incentivized to build moderation platforms that capture critical chokepoints between social media platforms, AI model developers, regulators, and moderation labor. From this position, vendors translate legal ambiguity into operational norms and recast moderation as a form of preemptive risk management. These findings reframe platform governance by revealing how a growing intermediary field of trust and safety institutions interprets external pressure on platform companies and shapes standard norms and practices for governance across the field.

Lucas Wright  is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. He researches the practice of online safety and security professionals, with a focus on how it is shaped by the law, discourses of harm and security, and markets for solutions, as well as the effect this practice has on individual and collective rights.

The event is part of the Seminar Series “Platform Politics and Policy”.

Researchers from outside the WZB who would like to attend may email the organizer, robert.gorwa [at] wzb.eu, to be put onto the seminar series mailing list.