TrustCon 2026 gathered Trust & Safety professionals from around the world to tackle the issues shaping the future of digital safety. Through sessions like The Evolution of the Creator Economy: Lessons Learned Early & What The Industry Needs Next, led by Ailís Daly, Head of Trust & Safety at WebPurify, an IntouchCX company, attendees exchanged perspectives, shared experiences, explored emerging challenges, and left with a clearer sense of what the industry needs next.

Beyond the formal sessions, community events reinforced that some of the industry’s most valuable conversations happen outside the conference stage. Birds of a Feather discussions gave practitioners space to connect and build relationships. Community lunches created room for dialogue around region-specific and SME-specific priorities. And a dinner hosted by IntouchCX, bringing together women leaders in Trust & Safety, offered an opportunity to strengthen relationships, share experiences and support one another.

In a field where no single organization has all the answers, being part of the conversation is part of building better solutions.

Here’s what we took away from three days with the best in the industry.

Setting the Tone

The Community Speaker Keynote from Daphne Keller, Director of Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, was essentially a love letter to frontline Trust & Safety workers. To hear one of the most respected legal minds in tech policy recognise this community’s work, from outside the operational world, looking in, meant a great deal to a lot of people in that room. A good reminder of something easy to lose sight of mid-quarter: the work matters, and it’s noticed.

The Creator Economy: Safety as a Competitive Differentiator

The creator economy panel brought together Emily Harman (Independent Advisor for Tech Platforms, NGOs and solutions providers), Madelaine Thomas (Founder, Image Angel), Travis Reed (Patreon) and AJ Brown (Chief Operating Officer, Brand Safety Institute). The session ran under Chatham House Rule, so what follows is the shape of the discussion rather than who said which part.

The starting point was a piece of history the industry doesn’t often acknowledge: the creator economy was first scaled in adult content platforms, not in the mainstream names most associated with it today. Those platforms had no option to defer the difficult parts, so they built safety, trust and monetization together from the outset, identity and age verification, consent workflows, content traceability and watermarking, impersonation and fraud detection, payment risk modelling, often years ahead of any regulation requiring it.

Today the sector spans fashion, fitness, finance, psychology and professional services. And because creators can move between platforms, they increasingly choose based on whether their identity is protected, their content is safeguarded, and their earnings are secure. Safety has shifted from a compliance line item to something closer to a retention strategy.

Which leads to the point Daly kept returning to: a great deal of this work has already been done somewhere, and the question for most platforms isn’t whether a solution exists but whether they know where to look for it. As she put it on the panel: “There is no place in Trust & Safety for high horses. We all need to be collaborating irrespective of your model.”

What Kept Coming Up

Three subjects surfaced repeatedly, in sessions and in hallways:

• Age-appropriate design and child safety governance: the shift from do we have a policy to can we evidence it, with design-level accountability and auditable systems now the expectation rather than the aspiration.
• Sustainable operations: scope expanding, regulatory load rising, and resourcing expected to absorb both. Rarely a session title; constantly a hallway conversation.
• AI on both sides of the ledger: generating new categories of harm at volume while also being offered as part of the answer, with standardised, open-source tooling emerging as a promising direction for problems no single organization benefits from solving privately.

Conversations at the EMEA community lunch, co-hosted by Sophie Walsh of Depop and Ailís Daly, added a regional dimension to all three: regulatory expectations and local operating conditions mean an approach proven in one market often can’t be lifted directly into another. And across sessions, one reality held, AI can improve efficiency and scale, but durable Trust & Safety programs still depend on experienced people making informed decisions when nuance matters most.

If We Had to Choose: Standout Sessions

A strong programme made this difficult. Four we’re still thinking about:

• Designing NCII Systems That Work for Adult Survivors, hosted by Emily Harman and David Wright CBE. Participants worked through the real trade-offs between survivor needs, operational realities, legal obligations and product design, a problem where the multi-perspective conversation is the method, not a nice-to-have. 
• The Political Content Creator Industry, led by Kristen Murdock and Isabel Linzer. The calibre of the room was itself the story, a group of seriously experienced policy people thrashing out the trade-offs, and the difficulty of doing so was the clearest indication of how genuinely hard this issue space is. It also surfaced the point that no platform is exempt: you run a bespoke clothing marketplace, so political content isn’t your problem, until you remember users can customize the garments. Everyone came out feeling like they’d completed a mini post-grad on the subject.
• Balancing Speed, Signal, and Scale: Moderating Scams on Dating Platforms, with Lucia Stacey Harris and Molly Rosner, on responding to fast-moving threats without sacrificing accuracy or user trust.
• The live recording of Ctrl Alt Speech, where Ben Whitelaw and Mike Masnick were joined by Kat Duffy and Zoe Darmé for a razor-sharp run through the week’s dominant issues, closing with the entire room singing Happy Birthday.

The People Behind the Progress

There is something quietly telling about an industry that schedules its own decompression, and about how quickly the queue formed.

WebPurify’s Birds of a Feather “Loosely Moderated” Happy Hour brought great conversations and brilliant people together at a beautiful venue. And the IntouchCX dinner for women leaders in Trust & Safety was one of those evenings where the conversation never stopped, equal parts laughter, candour, support and mischief.

As Daly reflected afterwards: “Fiercely smart people. Deeply kind people. People who challenge one another, support one another, and somehow make this work feel a little lighter.”

That combination of rigor and care is what makes progress possible in a field this demanding.

What Organizations Should Take Away

Across every conversation at TrustCon, from creator safety and NCII to political content and scam prevention, a few themes consistently surfaced:

1.Trust & Safety is a product differentiator. Users and creators choose platforms based on trust, transparency, and the confidence that their identities, content, and livelihoods will be protected.

2.Cross-functional decision-making is a priority. Trust & Safety cannot sit within one department. Product, operations, legal, policy, and customer experience teams all shape user safety outcomes.

3.Design for operational reality. Policies only succeed when they can be implemented consistently at scale. The strongest programs build the operational systems, communication and human expertise needed to apply them, balancing intent with execution.

4.Prevention creates better outcomes than reaction. Whether the subject was scams, NCII or creator protection, conversations repeatedly emphasized investing in safeguards that stop harm before it occurs rather than relying solely on downstream moderation.

5.Create more opportunities to learn across industries. Some of the most valuable ideas emerge when organizations openly discuss their successes, failures, and implementation challenges. Shared learning accelerates progress for everyone.

Where a Partner Fits

An internal team, however strong, sees its own platform, which is structural rather than a shortcoming. Working across many platforms produces a different vantage point: visibility of which approaches have already been tested elsewhere, which mitigations create new problems downstream, and what implementation genuinely requires. It means arriving at a problem with industry context rather than starting from first principles.

That’s the perspective WebPurify, an IntouchCX company, brings to its partners, embedding alongside client teams, connecting AI with human expertise, and applying operational knowledge from across industries to each partner’s specific challenges.

No single team solves Trust & Safety alone. Learn more about the lessons from TrustCon that could strengthen your Trust & Safety program.