Mainstreaming Trust & Safety in Online Gaming

This work was generously supported by the CTD and the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights

Online games are important spaces for entertainment, creativity, and social connection, yet they remain largely absent from mainstream debates about digital rights, platform governance, and online safety. In collaboration with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, this project explored how the experiences of the gaming industry could inform more effective and rights-respecting approaches to trust and safety across digital platforms.

The collaboration began with a public workshop that brought together experts from the gaming industry, civil society, government, and academia to examine the distinctive trust and safety challenges facing online games. Discussions focused on how games and social media confront many of the same problems, including harassment, privacy risks, harmful design practices, child safety, and content that moves across platforms, while also considering what each sector could learn from the other.

The project produced a series of five expert essays examining pro-social and universal design, privacy-preserving moderation, youth well-being, and community-led governance. It also resulted in the white paper Trust, Play, and Platforms: Sharing Lessons for Safer Digital Spaces, co-authored with Dean Jackson. Together, these publications argue for moving beyond reactive and punitive approaches to content moderation toward systems that build safety into platform design, support healthy community norms, protect user autonomy, and recognize the social benefits of online play.

Event poster, Mainstreaming Trust & Safety in Online Games