At TrustCon, Tuesday opened with an inspiring keynote talk from Catherine Teitelbaum, who shared perspectives and lessons from more than 25 years working in trust and safety. 

Catherine Teitelbaum is the Head of Family Trust for Amazon Kids. Catherine is a former educator, industry veteran and recognized pioneer in online safety and privacy, as well as age-appropriate design, policy development, and product guidance. Most recently Catherine led Trust & Safety for Twitch, Amazon’s popular live-streaming service. For more than a decade, Catherine held senior positions within Yahoo, leading the award-winning Yahooligans and Yahoo! Education products as well as global policy initiatives.

Catherine opened by telling us that she started working in trust and safety in 1997. Beforehand, she was a middle school teacher, and, at the end of every school year, she would take her students on a field trip to Silicon Valley, including a stop at Yahoo. While the kids were enjoying the office, employees would put Catherine aside to ask her questions about Yahooligans, the search engine’s conduct appropriateness policies. She realized the problems they were grappling with were a lot trickier than she first realized. Soon, she had a job offer from Yahoo to work on these questions full time. 

Since then, the questions around child content appropriateness has grown more and more complex. She says that this field is frequently making decisions that address real harms and even save lives, fighting fraud, exploitation, bullying, etc 24/7/365. She often asks herself how a desire to work with children and educate them led her to this work. A lot has changed since those days.

When she got started, she points out that there was no training in this area. There was no personal protective gear. There were no existing best practices. Things have changed since then, but she points to this community as the most important thing for protecting each other. “First responders do not show up alone. Neither should we.”

5 Key Lessons from 25 Years in T&S

  1. T&S is a balance of art and science. The art is the basic human understanding of how to anticipate harm and other things that can go wrong and to project into the future to plan against it. The technology we use to make this more efficient and effective is the science. And while the technology has gotten much better in 25 years, the art is still necessary. 
  2. There’s nothing new under the sun. Her 18 year old son has found some t-shirts in the attic from the 90s that he thinks are retro cool today. Catherine’s favorite t-shirt from those boxes is one from Yahoo that says “If we build it, they’ll abuse it.” Misuse of products is to be expected. She says that accepting this inevitability is part of resilience. 
  3. It’s healthy to be afraid (aka imposter syndrome). She cites one study that recently found that 82% of people have felt like an imposter. Catherine shares that she has. She wasn’t trained in tech. She has to ask a lot of technical questions when she’s presented with a new problem. That’s an important part of this job. 
  4. Put on your oxygen mask – aka resiliency training. How can TS professionals do this? Catherine tells them to be mission driven, to chase the problems they like to solve. She also points to practical steps they and their companies can take. Build a resiliency model in your teams (TSPA model). Make sure you have a good, comfortable place to do your work where others won’t be exposed. Find your team so you don’t feel siloed. And finally, take breaks. 
  5. Curiosity is the key to longevity. Catherine says that working in T&S is waking up every morning to check what happened overnight. Disruption to our jobs is to be assumed. In other careers, there are predictable trajectories. T&S does not have this. There’s no one path to ensure success in the future. There’s no reliable degree, first job, second job, etc. But Catherine says the wide varieties of experiences in this room is really powerful. This diversity means there are no deadends, no ceilings in our field. 

She closes by saying that she is where she is today because she learned to manage through immense change. She’s learned resiliency through deviating repeatedly from the roadmap. She could never have planned her career. Similarly, T&S professionals won’t be able to plan 5 years into the future, but they will learn a lot about themselves.