Strengthening our Trust and Safety Council

In 2016, we established the Twitter Trust and Safety Council, which brings together more than 40 experts and organizations to help advise us as we develop our products, programs and the Twitter Rules. We’ve been discussing internally and with the current members how we can make sure the Council best serves the people who use Twitter, and heard feedback that we needed to broaden membership to include a more diverse range of voices and organize members to have deeper conversations.  

Going forward, the Council will be made up of several groups, each focused on advising us on important issues that contribute to real-world harm. These are difficult areas to discuss, so it’s even more important to ensure these topics have dedicated time and are understood as unique challenges in their own right. In 2020, we will initially set up groups focused on:

• Safety and online harassment
• Human and digital rights
• Child sexual exploitation
• Suicide prevention and mental health

These four groups cover topics that are critical to ensuring people feel safe, and will be a crucial part in helping us learn how we can move faster to address emerging trends and risks. Focusing on these issues will help us more quickly adapt and address new trends and risks to consider. By bringing together a wider and more diverse range of perspectives, we hope to engage in more substantial discussion of these issues. 

We’ll also set up temporary working groups on other topics that will be better addressed in conversation with organisations that have related expertise, including those who may not already be members of the Council. One such group will work on the issues we face as we broaden our interpretation of dehumanization. 

What’s Coming Next 

We’ll share more on how we’ll expand the Council to include experts from more countries and perspectives not yet represented as well as other ways we’ll gather feedback from people, including details of which groups will be participating in the working groups. We are currently talking to existing members and potential new members about this. 

A lot of what we currently do, such as ongoing meetings with NGOs, activists and other organizations is always part of our process, but we haven’t done enough to share that externally. The feedback and advice we receive from them makes Twitter better and safer. Expect us to communicate more of our thinking moving forward. 

We’re grateful for the continued support and engagement from our partners around the world and look forward to collaborating with even more groups in the future.