Getting through your first Trust & Safety crisis

Every Trust & Safety team gets a bad week eventually. Something harmful goes viral before anyone reviews it. A journalist writes about a call your team made. A regulator (a government body that enforces the rules) sends a letter. Or something happens on the platform that hurts a real person.

A crisis is your normal work, sped up until only your habits hold. You build those habits in the quiet weeks, long before you need them.

Decide what counts ahead of time

Write down now what makes something a crisis: a real risk to a person, press coverage of a decision you made, a regulator getting in touch, a sudden jump in something serious, or an outage that stops your team reviewing reports.

That list earns its keep twice. Without it, you're deciding whether this counts in the moment, under pressure, with everyone watching. With it, the newest person on your team can raise the alarm without first wondering if it'll cost them.

The first hour

• Figure out what's actually true. The first version of any story is partly wrong, and anything you do based on it is hard to undo.
• Stop the live harm first: content still up, a person still at risk, a report you have to make to police or emergency services. Everything else can wait an hour.
• Leave the record alone. Keep the content, the decisions and the timestamps. The urge to tidy up destroys the evidence that protects you later.
• Open one chat channel and put everything there. A crisis run across four chats ends up with four versions of what happened.
• Say who speaks. To the outside world, that's your PR or legal team, never the reviewers. Inside the company, it's you, on a schedule you announce.

Who does what

Every crisis has four jobs, however few people you have:

• The decider makes the calls, and keeps a record that they were made.
• The doer has hands on the tools, actually taking content down and fixing things.
• The note-taker keeps the timeline as it happens: what was known when, and who decided what.
• The voice owns every word that leaves the room, to the bosses or the public.

The note-taker is the job people skip, and the one everyone begs for later: the review afterward, the regulator, and your own memory. On a two-person team you each take two jobs, and you still say them out loud. The way this goes wrong is everyone doing a bit of everything.

Updating your bosses without spinning it

Executives need four lines from you:

• What we know: confirmed facts only, with times.
• What we did: what you've done, and when.
• What we don't know yet: the open questions, said plainly.
• Next update: a time, and then stick to it.

Send it when you said you would, even if the update is "nothing has changed." The third line is the hard one and the important one. Saying early what you don't know yet is what stops the full story, when it comes out, from looking like you hid the partial one.

The people who saw it

Someone found this, and someone spent hours looking at the worst of it. Before the review, before the statement for the press, their manager checks on each of them by name, offers time away from reviewing with no penalty, and notes in the incident record what they were exposed to.

Our guide on leading a team through a bad day covers the week that follows. The habit here is simply that this step is on the list at all, and higher up than the report to your bosses.

The look back that makes the next one smaller

Afterward, the team sits down and works out what happened and what to fix. Most companies call this a postmortem, and you'll hear the word in interviews.

• Hold it within two weeks, while people still remember, and build it from the note-taker's timeline.
• Actually don't blame anyone. Name the holes in the system, not the person who fell into one.
• Leave with three fixes, each with an owner and a date: something you'll now catch sooner, a process that'll work better, and a rule that needs a rethink.
• Save it somewhere the next manager will find it. Every new manager goes hunting for exactly this document in their first month.