As the T&S field matures, policymakers, regulators, and industry practitioners are increasingly hungry for empirical evidence to guide their work. As part of the Social Media Governance Initiative, we downloaded an archive of 20 years of over 1,200 research articles written on various online Trust and Safety topics. Our postbaccalaureate fellow, Michael Bochkur Dratver, then began a systematic coding of all articles in the archive using a codebook that was developed collaboratively among those in our lab and feedback from others interested in the project.

The SMGI/JC hosted a two-day in person conference on Thursday and Friday March 30th and 31st, 2023 at Yale Law School. This two-day conference included presentations from a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and industry practitioners discussing their work exploring a range of issues of online governance.

Sponsored by the Justice Collaboratory’s Social Media Governance Initiative, this course on Trust, Safety, and Governance helps prepare participants to be effective practitioners of governance and leaders within Trust & Safety teams. The three-day intensive workshop provides state of the art training on ways to use digital technologies to create and maintain prosocial environments.

The Social Media Governance Initiative is hosting a one day workshop entitled “Community Driven Governance Online: Past, Present, and Future”. The forum will discuss approaches to online governance which put communities at the center of governance structures, providing community members tools, training, and systems to build communities and self-govern.

Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory has launched a new research network within their Social Media Governance Initiative. The Research Network is a consortium of scholars working together to examine the sociocultural impacts of digital technologies on contemporary social life.

Twitter launched a project called Birdwatch which allows some form of community governance. Using this data we want to examine the success of Birdwatch.