New Worlds Arise: Online Trust and Safety

Abstract

Over the past two decades around the world, people's social lives are increasingly occurring within online digital spaces. Throughout this transition, social media platforms have been struggling to govern an increasing number of complex social phenomena that have carried over from our offline world to these new social platforms, ranging from bullying and harassment to the sale of illicit goods. In their attempts to build out systems to govern these issues, many platforms have drawn inspiration from models borrowed from the offline world familiar to criminologists. In this review, we draw attention to the field of online trust and safety. We provide an overview of the ways platforms have developed tools and systems to govern the people, content, and interactions that take place on their platforms while also looking at the way the field itself has developed rapidly over the past few years. Lastly, we look at research that exposes opportunities for promising paths forward to govern these digital social spaces, highlighting the ways that criminology research can positively contribute toward building vital online communities.