The Trust & Safety Academy

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Course content

We are proud to announce a first-of-its-kind academic course on Trust & Safety. Geared towards both current Trust & Safety professionals seeking to deepen their knowledge, as well as those looking to join the industry, the course offers a comprehensive overview of the fast-growing field. NYU’s Institute for Impact and Intrapreneurship and ActiveFence’s team of experts will cover the many facets of Trust & Safety, explaining its goals, challenges, work processes, and functions, highlighting how innovation drives success in Trust & Safety.

Upon completing 15 academic hours over ten 90-minute virtual classroom sessions and at the end, participants will receive an NYU Executive Education Certificate in Trust & Safety.

10 lessons
15 hours
$1500
NYU certificate
Start April 13, 2023 at 10am EDT | 7am PDT | 3pm BST
Lesson 1

Introduction to Trust & Safety

How did the industry of Trust & Safety develop? What role does Trust & Safety play within organizations and the larger tech ecosystem? What are the threats facing online platforms and their users across different types of platforms? These are the questions Goldberger will answer in this first introductory class. From the creation of the internet and the first innovations in safety-driven technology to the impact of online platforms on the world, she will share the history, threats, and events that have shaped Trust & Safety and where it stands today.

Inbal Goldberger
VP Trust & Safety, ActiveFence
Dr. Nir Tsuk
New York University's Global Distinguished Scholar Founder & Director, the Institute for Impact and Intrapreneurship
Lesson 2

Threat Deep Dive: Disinformation, Misinformation, and Geopolitical Risk

This two-part session will tackle the complexities of disinformation, and provide an understanding of how false narratives are created, the threat actors behind them, and how they interplay with current events.

We will discus how foreign and domestic actors use fake accounts, amplify content, and establish complex networks to manipulate public discourse. Using real-world examples such as recent elections and the war in Ukraine, we will look at how platforms quickly become hijacked to spread false narratives. In the second half of the session, we will demonstrate how emerging trends, narratives, and misinformation create risks to online platforms that come with potential offline consequences. We will also explain how narratives promoting social unrest, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and political and health misinformation can arise from significant political and cultural events.

Dr. Dennis Kahn
Research Team Lead: Information Operations, ActiveFence
Sivanne Shalev
Head of Emerging Trends and Misinformation, ActiveFence
Lesson 3

Threat Deep Dive: Terrorism and Extremism

Some of Trust & Safety’s most difficult tasks are dealing with the ugliest content on the web: building support for, creating, and disseminating content related to terrorism, extremism, hate speech, and violence. The recruitment of terrorists, promotion of white supremacy, and live streams of mass shootings are some real, on-platform examples of the manifestations of these risks. These abuses can come from organized networks or coordinated predators using sophisticated methods to avoid detection. We will dive into how threat actors enter online spaces to foment and spread these harms, and will explain their complexities and evasive techniques.

Yoni Deblinger
VP of Extremism, ActiveFence
Lesson 4

Threat Deep Dive: Child Abuse

In this session, we will focus on the online threats facing children, such as grooming, sextortion, and exploitation. Sharing how the nuanced tactics of digital predators deceive detection, we will expound on how predator communities have learned to manipulate codewords to exploit both the dark web and popular platforms.

Dr. Avi Jager
Lesson 5

The Intelligence-Based Approach to Content Moderation

After gaining a clear understanding of the online threat landscape, we will dive into the inner workings of Trust & Safety teams. We will start with the most essential component - detecting harmful content. Nisman will break down how the tools used by Trust & Safety teams allow for the proactive detection of threat actors and how employing tactics such as abuse analysis, linguistic recording, and network tracking can help teams prevent the spread of these harms.

Daniel Nisman
Director of Intelligence Solutions, ActiveFence
Lesson 6

The AI-Based Approach to Content Moderation

This class will shed light on the other side of harmful content detection: artificial intelligence. Orr will explain how technologies like machine learning models, automation, digital hashing, and risk scores, help teams scale by scanning more content, quicker, increasing the recall rate for potentially harmful content, and by extension, protecting the mental health of human moderators. Orr will also discuss the limitations of AI - from lacking visibility into the nuance and context of content to overlooking regional differences and content sentiment.

Iftach Orr
Co-Founder & CTO, ActiveFence
Matar Haller
VP Data at ActiveFence
Lesson 7

The Trust & Safety Lifecycle

Being in a new industry, Trust & Safety teams are tasked not only with protecting platforms and their users, but learning on the fly about how to best prepare, create, and maintain these digital spaces. This session will review the lifecycle of Trust & Safety teams, including safety by design, triaging risks, measuring success, and releasing transparency reports. It will provide students with an understanding the different components necessary to make and keep platforms healthy from the beginning, as well as how to maintain trust in the public sphere.

Liron Hakim Bobrov
Director of Content, ActiveFence
Lesson 8

Trust & Safety’s Legislative Environment

In the past few years, the industry has witnessed a surge in countries worldwide regulating online platforms. Legislation like the UK Online Safety Bill, the EU’s Digital Services Act, and California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act have impacted how online platforms are regulated. This session will review these laws in addition to Section 230, current court cases on platform liability, and the future of internet law.

Adv. Michal Brand-Gold
VP General Counsel, ActiveFence
Lesson 9

Building User Trust With Platform Policy

Platform policies determine what is allowed and not allowed and also communicate to users and the company how policy violations will be handled. The policies themselves protect the safety of users and of the platform. How those policies are constructed, communicated and enforced defines and maintains (or loses) the trust that users and the community have in the platform. Workable platform policy for content moderation aims to find the right mix between what the platform must do—defined by the expectations of regulation—and what the platform should do based on its own understanding of what is right, ethical, moral, or necessary for the business.
Exploring these complex and evolving topics, this session will provide a thorough understanding of the regulations that shape the industry and the considerations important in defining platform policy that meets regulatory obligations while also building trust with users.

Juan Felipe Rincón
Senior Director, Trust & Safety, Noice
Lesson 10

Adaptive Innovation in Trust & Safety

At its core, the Trust & Safety industry is like an endless game of whack-a-mole, trying to keep up with new threats and tactics through technological innovation. As the industry matures, so do its challenges and the need to apply creativity to solve them, for example: How can we detect harm in encrypted content we cannot see? How can teams prevent abuse in the metaverse when the metaverse is still just an evolving concept? Trust & Safety which is not constantly finding new solutions to old and new problems, will soon find itself left behind, with flourishing abuse. For that reason, adopting an innovative mindset is critical for Trust & Safety professionals to prepare for the future. In this final session, we will walk through the principles of adaptive innovation in disruptive times.

Inbal Goldberger
VP Trust & Safety, ActiveFence
Dr. Nir Tsuk
New York University's Global Distinguished Scholar Founder & Director, the Institute for Impact and Intrapreneurship

Meet the experts

Dr. Nir Tsuk
New York University's Global Distinguished Scholar Founder & Director, the Institute for Impact and Intrapreneurship
Nir has over 25 years of experience in social capital and networks, entrepreneurship, and impact. Serving as NYU’s Global Distinguished Scholar, Nir launched the NYU Institute for Impact and Entrepreneurship, bringing the language of innovation to those who need it most. He received his doctorate in social and political sciences from Cambridge University.
Inbal Goldberger
VP Trust & Safety at ActiveFence
Inbal has over 20 years of experience in Trust & Safety, Intelligence, and Cyber Security. Previously, Inbal managed Trust & Safety teams ranging from intelligence and enforcement to incident management at Google Search for eight years. She holds a BA in Linguistics and an MBA from Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Dennis Kahn
Research Team Lead: Information Operations at ActiveFence
Leads a team of researchers focused on political disinformation and influence operations. Fifteen years of experience doing research on political psychology and political disinformation. Holds a M.A. from Lund University and a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University.
Sivanne Shalev
Head of Emerging Trends and Misinformation at ActiveFence
Sivanne heads a global team of regional-experts who report on geopolitical events. Previously, she researched user perceptions of content moderation and worked on the 2019 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, where she completed her MSc in the Social Science of the Internet.
Yoni Deblinger
VP of Extremism at ActiveFence
Yoni leads services and solutions for terrorism, hate speech, and child safety at ActiveFence. Yoni has over ten years of experience in intelligence and security, emphasizing counter-terrorism research in both the private and public sectors. Yoni holds a BSc in Construction Engineering.
Dr. Avi Jager
Head of Child Safety and Human Exploitation at ActiveFence
Avi leads multi-lingual, international teams of analysts and researchers in child safety and human exploitation online. He holds a B.A. in Government from Reichman University and an MA and PhD from the War Studies Department of King's College London.
Sandra Grodensky
VP of Mobile in Delivery at ActiveFence
Sandra leads solutions for the mobile ecosystem, ranging from malware, ad-fraud, impersonation, and illegal collection of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) on app platforms. She holds a BA in Economics and Business Management from The Academic College of Tel-Aviv where she specialized in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
Daniel Nisman
Director of Intelligence Solutions at ActiveFence
Daniel has over 14 years of experience building intelligence teams and products that harness social media insights. He has worked to combat money laundering, assisted multinational corporations in mitigating risk, and served the United Nations and aid organizations operating in high-risk zones.
Iftach Orr
CTO and co-founder of ActiveFence
Iftach has over 15 years of experience in covert data collection, security, reverse engineering, mobile, and big data. Previously, Iftach served as an intelligence officer in the Israeli military and as VP R&D at SimilarWeb. He is currently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Lool Ventures.
Adv. Michal Brand-Gold
VP General Counsel of ActiveFence
Michal Adv. Brand-Gold is an experienced business and corporate lawyer with over 15 years of practice working in hyper growth technology companies. She is the Chairman of the Trust & Safety Forum of the Association of Corporate Counsel and a member of the Israeli and the New York Bar. Michal Adv. Brand-Gold holds an LLM from Columbia Law School.
Matar Haller
VP Data at ActiveFence
Matar Haller leads the Data Group at ActiveFence, where her teams are responsible for the data and algorithms which fuel ActiveFence’s ability to ingest, detect and analyze harmful activity and malicious content at scale in an ever-changing, complex online landscape. Matar holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley, where she recorded and analyzed signals from electrodes surgically implanted in human brains. Matar is passionate about expanding leadership opportunities for women in STEM fields and has three children who surprise and inspire her every day.
Juan Felipe Rincón
Senior Director, Trust & Safety, Noice
Juan Felipe is the Senior Director of Trust & Safety for Noice, an early-stage startup building a social platform for people who love games. Over the 10 years prior to his work at Noice he was global lead of Site Policy at Twitter, led multiple policy development efforts at YouTube, and led a number of teams in Google's Trust & Safety team focused on policy communications and outreach, antispam enforcement, incident response, qualitative and quantitative research on user and product risk. Prior to joining Google, he spent the better part of the previous 15 years in the mobile and wireless industry and startup ecosystem, focusing on building developer trust in the mobile web and app space. He received his Master's degree from Georgetown University in Communications, Culture and Technology and his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in Computers, Telecommunications and Society.