Where the job goes after moderation

Most people in Trust & Safety (the teams that protect people from harm online) start as moderators. That means working the "queue": the endless list of reported posts, appeals and tricky cases waiting for a decision. Some do it at the platform itself, and many do it at an outsourcing company the platform hires.

It's the widest door into the field. It's also the job where the next step is hardest to see, so people stay longer than they meant to, mostly because nobody showed them what came next. Consider this the showing.

Five ways up

None of these means starting over, and every one is easier from inside a moderation job than from outside the field. Here's what each asks of you, and how long it usually takes:

• Policy (writing the rules for what's allowed). It asks for writing, and for cases where a rule got it wrong plus how you'd reword it. Usually 18 to 36 months.
• Investigations. It asks you to spot links between accounts and write up what you found. Usually 12 to 24 months.
• Quality and training. It asks you to check other reviewers' work and teach new ones. Usually 12 to 18 months.
• Product or program. It asks you to work with engineers to improve the team's tools. Usually 24 to 48 months.
• Management. It asks you to train new people and cover for your manager. Usually 18 to 30 months.

Those times assume you're building proof for the move on purpose. Without that, people report five and six years in the same job, which is the whole reason this guide exists.

The move happens before the job opens

Hardly anyone gets promoted by applying cold to an internal job posting. They move because the person hiring has already seen what they can do. You build that proof in your current job, in the spare minutes around your targets, and it's mostly just writing things down.

Here's how one move into policy actually went. In month one, a moderator started a private doc listing cases where the rule gave the wrong answer: one line each, with the case number. By month four she had 14 cases, and three of them were the same gap. She wrote two paragraphs of new wording and sent them to the policy person who ran the team's review sessions.

In month six she was invited to the policy working group as the moderator voice. Unpaid, an hour a week, on top of the day job. In month eleven the fix went live as a rule change, with her wording mostly intact. In month fourteen a policy job opened. Two people applied, and one of them had already written a rule that was live. You can guess how that went.

None of it needed permission, a budget or a job title. It needed a document nobody asked for, kept up for eleven months.

What to build for each route

• Policy: keep a running list of cases where a rule failed, with the wording you'd use instead. Volunteer for the sessions where reviewers compare their decisions.
• Investigations: write up one case linking several accounts together, in the format your investigations team uses. Ask to see one of theirs first.
• Quality and training: take every new trainee you're offered, and ask to run a session where reviewers compare decisions.
• Product: note every place the tools waste your time, with the seconds counted. The people who build the tools are hungry for exactly this.
• Management: cover for your manager when they're out, and say yes to the scheduling job nobody wants. Somebody has to own the spreadsheet.

Notice the pattern. The people who move up fastest are rarely the fastest reviewers. They're the ones who wrote down what the work taught them.

Moving out of an outsourcing company

If you work at an outsourcing company that moderates for a platform, getting hired by a platform directly is a real step up. Honestly, though, the platform you work for rarely hires straight from its outsourcing staff, and some contracts ban it for a while.

Two things work. Make yourself visible in the field, which mostly means writing and showing up in the community. And aim at the outsourcing company's other clients, or at platforms that use a different company, where those contract rules don't apply.

When leaving the field is the right answer

Some people should leave, and this field is bad at saying so. If the content has stopped bothering you in a way that worries you, or if it's started following you home, that isn't a toughness problem a new job title will fix. Talk to someone.

And your skills travel further than you think. Risk, fraud, compliance, safeguarding and privacy teams all hire people from Trust & Safety, and none of them will ask you to look at the worst of the internet every day.