DTSP@5: Our Progress Toward a Safer and More Trustworthy Internet

DTSP - 5 Years of Promoting a Safer and More TrustWorthy Internet

How five years of industry consensus-building set the standard for digital safety

Five years ago, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership (DTSP) set out with a single mission: promoting a safer and more trustworthy internet. We’ve executed on this mission by articulating best practices for trust and safety that can be adopted by organizations of all sizes regardless of business model, product type, or user base.

Through a framework that follows the product development lifecycle, we have a simple but powerful idea: standardize the practices organizations use to address risks, not the type of content or behavior that should be acceptable across the many digital products and services that comprise the internet.

In five years, DTSP turned a simple question — what does good trust and safety actually look like? — into an internationally recognized answer. DTSP has achieved ISO/IEC standardization, grown membership by 67%, and contributed to some of the most consequential online safety policy debates worldwide. Our work proves that industry consensus practices, done right, can raise the bar for everyone.

I. Origins: practitioner-driven best practices

Empirically describing trust and safety from a practitioner perspective, raising the bar for safety overall while remaining risk-based and proportionate.

Technology companies have made trust and safety a priority for many years. The field of trust and safety, however, had not yet developed the kinds of frameworks, assessments, and standards that had proven crucial to maturing and organizing other tech disciplines like cybersecurity and data protection.

In February 2021, DTSP launched with the publication of its Best Practices Framework, a high-level framework of concrete commitments and practical examples of best practices that are content- and conduct-agnostic. They do not dictate what sort of content or behavior a digital product or service should allow. Instead, they provide guidance that is proportionate, risk-based, and aligned with the right to freedom of expression and international human rights frameworks.

DTSP filled a gap by articulating what good should look like in the field of trust and safety, driven by the day-to-day experience of practitioners inside companies, and informed by engagement with government, civil society, and other key external stakeholders.

The open and global internet has always revolved around robust standards that ensure the interoperability of services. DTSP has brought that ethos to the development of framework and practices to address the important discussions occurring in homes, schools, and businesses around the world and at all different levels of government on what digital trust and safety should look like.

II. Evolution: adapting to regulation and advancing international standards

How a global voluntary effort can inform and align with national laws and regulations via international standards

DTSP launched with an approach that began with best practices, the development of self-assessments, followed by third-party assessments of company implementation of the practices. By December 2021, DTSP published its self assessment methodology for public consultation, receiving feedback from organizations of all types located around the world. In 2022, an inaugural report based on aggregated and anonymized self-assessments presented an unprecedented look at how companies assessed their own trust and safety efforts, identifying strengths and opportunities for improvement alike.

As DTSP developed its approach to third-party assessment, it also contended with a rapidly changing external environment. The enactment of online safety regulations in Australia, Singapore, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, among other countries, created new compliance obligations that restructured the trust and safety function within companies. Requirements for very large services to be audited in the EU, and for nearly all services to conduct risk assessments for the UK, raised questions about the necessity of voluntary assessments.

Amid these changes, the Partnership evolved its approach and engaged with the international standards community. Instead of creating a voluntary industry standard, DTSP evolved the Safe Framework into globally applicable guidance that can be used as part of compliance with regulations governing trust and safety in many jurisdictions around the world.

In 2023, DTSP became one of only a small number of organizations approved by the international committee for information technology standards that can submit publicly available specifications for review and approval as ISO/IEC standards. In January 2025, the Safe Framework was decisively approved in a vote by national standards bodies from all over the world. This vote demonstrated that the Safe Framework met the extensive document requirements for publicly available specifications. Because DTSP makes the Safe Framework available without cost, ISO/IEC 25389 is also one of relatively few international standards that is publicly available at no charge.

III. Membership and Growth

67% membership growth is just the beginning as we accelerate our momentum 

DTSP has grown from its founding members to include organizations ranging from a startup AI chatbot through to the largest technology companies on the planet. DTSP companies provide a wide range of products and services, across the internet stack, to billions of people around the world. 

Currently participating partners include: Apple, Bitly, Bumble, Cantina, Discord, Google, LinkedIn, Match Group, Meta Platforms, Inc., Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, TikTok, and Twitch.

As DTSP has extended its membership to include a diversity of online products and services, its framework has been able to encompass a wide range of risks, including those relevant to companies whose products bridge the online and offline worlds. 

DTSP membership provides a wide range of benefits: 

  • Gain access to exclusive events, collaborations, and resources that will enhance and extend your organization’s trust and safety operations.
  • Contribute organizational expertise to the shaping of best practices and standards for trust and safety that account for differences in company size and business models.
  • Demonstrate conformity with industry benchmarks of excellence for trust and safety, while contributing to and benefiting from thought leadership that advances the field.
  • Collaborate and learn from peers and industry experts in a trusted environment, identifying best practices in emerging areas, such as age assurance.
  • Participate in the development of international standards through DTSP’s cooperation with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
  • Drive the uptake of best practices by key stakeholders, including policymakers, regulators, and civil society around the world.

Providers of digital products and services who aspire to implement the DTSP Best Practices in their operations should consider joining the partnership, to help us shape the future of digital trust and safety.

IV. Emerging technologies and future-proofed practices

Identifying consensus best practices from age assurance to artificial intelligence

DTSP was purposely designed to accommodate swiftly changing technological development in two fundamental ways: 

  1. The Safe Framework provides a future-proofed, technologically agnostic approach to trust and safety that can accommodate new developments without being overtaken by events. The core DTSP commitments: product development, governance, enforcement, improvement, and transparency need not be reinvented to accommodate radically different technology. Rather than treating new paradigms as a clean break from the past, DTSP consistently asks how existing best practices can be adapted and extended before concluding that new ones are needed. 
  2. The Partnership brings together organizations around critical topics to identify new best practices and publish pathbreaking consensus best practices. From Guiding Principles and Best Practices for Age Assurance to Best Practices for AI and Automation in Trust & Safety, DTSP publications present industry-wide views on the challenges and opportunities afforded by these specific technologies and their impact on the field.  

V. Impact and thought leadership

Academic articles, industry blog posts, and concrete contributions to urgent policy conversations

The DTSP team not only facilitates industry consensus on best practices, but also publishes research and commentary that sheds new light on trust and safety challenges and helps external stakeholders understand the what, how, and why of the practices used by companies to keep users safe. Selected highlights include:  

VI. Looking ahead

Building on progress to make a safer and more trustworthy digital future

What started as industry consensus has grown into a global reference point for online trust and safety.

As DTSP considers the coming five years, we will continue to build on our strengths and navigate new trust and safety challenges as a Partnership:

  • Growing a family of digital safety standards, first by preparing our Trust & Safety Glossary of Terms for transposition as a draft ISO/IEC international standard.
  • Exploring appropriate approaches to assessing conformity with the Safe Framework, mindful of regulatory requirements.
  • Identifying opportunities to bring our trust and safety best practices into conversation with AI standards under development.
  • Building consensus around complex regulatory requirements and novel institutions, from risk assessments to out-of-court dispute settlement.

Our Partnership is proud of the impact we have made and we are even more excited for what is ahead.