CS 5342

Trust and Safety: Platforms, Policies, Products

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

Trust & Safety is an emerging field that focuses on reducing the harm from interpersonal abuse in digital spaces. The abuse types involved - harassment, misinformation, unwanted sexual content - are often "lawful but awful," requiring developers to build their own socio-technical frameworks of what is appropriate behavior in their platform. In this course, we will look at digital abuse through an analysis of historical incidents. We will study how the field developed standards across algorithmic response, product design and manual removals. Students will join teams to describe an emerging online abuse type, develop appropriate moderation pipelines (e.g., using modern machine learning such as LLMs), and detail associated policies, all in an environment mimicking the realities seen in practice. This course might expose students to disturbing material.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: Cornell Tech students.

• Recognize common abuse categories as they intersect with modern digital technologies.
• Analyze the varying levers in the hands of product owners to reduce abuse, including safety-by-design, proactive ranking choices and reactive removals.
• Recognize the ethical trade-offs behind content moderation decisions in online spaces.
• Identify emerging risks and make decisions around the correct precision/recall boundaries for a classifier built to detect harmful content.

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