Four Functional Quadrants for Trust & Safety Tools: Detection, Investigation, Review & Enforcement (DIRE) <div> <br> </div>

Public discourse and regulatory debates about online trust and safety have long been dominated by a focus on rules, not tools: preoccupied mostly by the questio

The Peer Review Crisis Demands Radical Reform: Why Reviewers Should Become Paid Professional Referees

The peer review system, fundamental to scientific quality control, faces a significant crisis. As journal editors, we often need to send up to 35 invitations just to secure two reviewers, confronting daily the collapse of voluntary participation. This reflects a critical imbalance: while publication pressure intensifies, willingness to evaluate diminishes, creating "literature elephantiasis", i.e., an overwhelming proliferation of papers exceeding human processing capacity. Current compensation models, relying on token recognition and database access, fail to incentivize quality engagement and may encourage ethically problematic practices like excessive self-citation. The unchecked infiltration of artificial intelligence into peer review, with minimal enforcement, further undermines system integrity. We propose transforming peer reviewers into professional referees, modeled on sports officiating. This radical solution involves formal training and certification for reviewers, equipping them to assess scientific merit, methodology, and ethics comprehensively. Like sports referees supported by assistants, scientific referees would collaborate with specialists - including statisticians, methodology experts, and reference checkers - ensuring thorough evaluation while distributing workload effectively. Funding would come from publishers or research funders, recognizing peer review as an essential, compensated component of the research lifecycle. Implementation faces challenges including publisher resistance and funding allocation, which we address through phased transition strategies. This professionalization addresses current inequities where conscientious scientists shoulder disproportionate reviewing burdens while others contribute minimally. Professional reviewers would view evaluation as valued career development rather than unwelcome obligation. Critics citing independence concerns overlook the sports analogy: referees maintain impartiality through professional standards despite league compensation. Quality scientific evaluation requires dedicated expertise, adequate training, and fair remuneration. Science deserves better than a system dependent on goodwill and guilt - it needs professional referees now.

mitchellh/vouch

A community trust management system based on explicit vouches to participate.

Trust Infrastructure on ATproto

I agree with Nick that you have noted a big hard problem, with Zooko’s triangle type trade-offs. (For a semi-related example that is “easier” but still crazy difficult, see our “PeerFlow: Secure Load Balancing in Tor” https://doi.org/10.1515/popets-2017-0017 ) As noted or implied already in this thread: in the end, if someone can cheaply spin up indefinite unlinked identities and build good reputations for them, and if trust is based on such reputations, it is hard (impossible?) to avoid them s...

Design principles for long-lived circular organization: An Ostromian perspective

Circular organizational templates such as holacracy and sociocracy have gained popularity. In such organizations, all members have rights to participate in decision-making. Which factors enable such organizations to sustain their circular form? We investigate 18 highly diverse circular organizations to answer this question. Our findings show that Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for avoiding the tragedy of the commons may also explain circular organizations’ longevity. With regard to their relevance, we sort these principles into three groups: indispensable, queasy, and quite unproblematic principles. Our main theoretical contribution is to show that circular organizations can be understood as commons, and thus to make research on the governance of commons fruitful for the design of circular organizations. We show that implementing circular forms has to mind especially the queasy design principles of monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms, and balancing individual contributions and rewards.

Trust & Safety Library - Trust & Safety Professional Association

Welcome to the Trust & Safety Library! We use this space to collect articles, blog posts, journal articles, lectures, podcasts, and websites that trust and safety professionals may find useful in developing policies, supporting moderators, building systems to detect violations, and generally deepening their practice. We welcome your submissions and feedback. This project was initially

Trust Revolution

Unfiltered conversations with builders, thinkers, and operators in Bitcoin and beyond. Exploring systems we trust, why they work (or don't), and what's next.

Composable Trust, Part 1: Communities Without Credible Exit - Eclectic Corvine Muses

We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?

Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration

Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication. The number of low-quality or fraudulent publications is rising to hundreds of thousands per year, which—if unchecked—will damage the scientific and economic progress of our societies. The result is editor and reviewer fatigue, irreproducible experiments, misguided experiments, disinformation and escalating costs that devour funding from taxpayers intended for research. It is high time to reevaluate current publishing models and outline a global plan to stop this unhealthy development. A conference was therefore organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to draft an action plan with specific recommendations, as follows. (i) Academia should resume control of publishing using non-profit publishing models (e.g. diamond open-access). (ii) Adjust incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity, in a reputation economy where the gaming of publication numbers and citation metrics distorts the perception of academic excellence. (iii) Implement mechanisms to prevent and detect fake publications and fraud which are independent of publishers. (iv) Draft and implement legislations, regulations and policies to increase publishing quality and integrity. This is a call to action for universities, academies, science organizations and funders to unite and join this effort.

Open Evaluation: A Vision for Entirely Transparent Post-Publication Peer Review and Rating for Science

The two major functions of a scientific publishing system are to provide access to and evaluation of scientific papers. While open access (OA) is becoming a reality, open evaluation (OE), the other side of coin, has received less attention. Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community and thus the very course of science. It also influences the use of scientific findings in public policy. The current system of scientific publishing provides only journal prestige as an indication of the quality of new papers and relies on a non-transparent and noisy pre-publication peer review process, which delays publication by many months on average. Here I propose an OE system, in which papers are evaluated post-publication in an ongoing fashion by means of open peer review and rating. Through signed ratings and reviews, scientists steer the attention of their field and build their reputation. Reviewers are motivated to be objective, because low-quality or self-serving signed evaluations will negatively impact their reputation. A core feature of this proposal is a division of powers between the accumulation of evaluative evidence and the analysis of this evidence by paper evaluation functions (PEFs). PEFs can be freely defined by individuals or groups (e.g. scientific societies) and provide a plurality of perspectives on the scientific literature. Simple PEFs will use averages of ratings, weighting reviewers (e.g. by H-factor) and rating scales (e.g. by relevance to a decision process) in different ways. Complex PEFs will use advanced statistical techniques to infer the quality of a paper. Papers with initially promising ratings will be more deeply evaluated. The continual refinement of PEFs in response to attempts by individuals to influence evaluations in their own favor will make the system ungameable. OA and OE together have the power to revolutionize scientific publishing and usher in a new culture of transparency, constructive criticism, and collaboration.

A New Paradigm for Scientific Publishing, Peer Review, and Impact Assessment

Scientific publishing and peer review have evolved little in three centuries, while the demands placed on them have grown profoundly. The growing role of artificial intelligence has underscored deep, systemic shortcomings of an aging system that has largely evaded innovation, a system whose origins are appallingly closer to the invention of the printing press than to the internet. We can do better – much better. This article is intended as the beginning of a communal experiment: a living document that critically reviews the modern academic publishing and peer-review system and presents a concrete framework to address what bibliometrics experts¹ have characterized as "the pervasive misapplication of indicators to the evaluation of scientific performance". Building on the Leiden Manifesto, DORA, and a body of scholarship spanning many disciplines and decades, we present a community-governed, non-profit platform organized around three trust-weighted impact factors, for articles, authors, and reviewers, with full algorithmic transparency, an open development log, and structural decoupling of credibility scoring from content moderation and from monetization. We invite the community to discuss, critique, and help shape it.

CCFS cryptographically curated file system

The Internet was originally designed to be a next-generation phone system that could withstand a Soviet attack. Today, we ask the Internet to perform tasks that no longer resemble phone calls in the face of threats that no longer resemble Soviet bombardment. However, we have come to rely on names that can be subverted at every level of the stack or simply be allowed to rot by their original creators. It is possible for us to build networks of content that serve the content distribution needs of today while withstanding the hostile environment that all modern systems face. This dissertation presents the Cryptographically Curated File System (CCFS), which offers five properties that we feel a modern content distribution system should provide. The first property is Strong Links, which maintains that only the owner of a link can change the content to which it points. The second property, Permissionless Distribution, allows anyone to become a curator without dependence on a naming or numbering authority. Third, Independent Validation arises from the fact that the object seeking affirmation need not choose the source of trust. Connectivity, the fourth property, allows any curator to delegate and curate the right to alter links. Each curator can delegate the control of a link and that designee can do the same, leaving a chain of trust from the original curator to the one who assigned the content. Lastly, with the property of Collective Confidence, trust does not need to come from a single source, but can instead be an aggregate affirmation. Since CCFS embodies all five of these properties, it can serve as the foundational technology for a more robust Web. CCFS can serve as the base of a web that performs the tasks of today’s Web, but also may outperform it. In the third chapter, we present a number of scenarios that demonstrate the capacity and potential of CCFS. The system can be used as a publication platform that has been re-optimized within the constraints of the modern Internet, but not the constraints of decades past. The curated links can still be organized into a hierarchical namespace (e.g., a Domain Naming System (DNS)) and de jure verifications (e.g., a Certificate Authority (CA) system), but also support social, professional, and reputational graphs. This data can be distributed, versioned, and archived more efficiently. Although communication systems were not designed for such a content-centric system, the combination of broadcasts and point-to-point communications are perfectly suited for scaling the distribution, while allowing communities to share the burdens of hosting and maintenance. CCFS even supports the privacy of friend-to-friend networks without sacrificing the ability to interoperate with the wider world. Finally, CCFS does all of this without damaging the ability to operate search engines or alert systems, providing a discovery mechanism, which is vital to a usable, useful web. To demonstrate the viability of this model, we built a research prototype. The results of these tests demonstrate that while the CCFS prototype is not ready to be used as a drop-in replacement for all file system use cases, the system is feasible. CCFS is fast enough to be usable and can be used to publish, version, archive, and search data. Even in this crude form, CCFS already demonstrates advantages over previous state-of-the-art systems. When the Internet was designed, there were relatively fewer computers that were far weaker than the computers we have now. They were largely connected to each other over reliable connections. When the Internet was first created, computing was expensive and propagation delay was negligible. Since then, the propagation delay has not improved on a Moore’s Law Curve. Now, latency has come to dominate all other costs of retrieving content; specifically, the propagation time has come to dominate the latency. In order to improve the latency, we are paying more for storage, processing, and bandwidth. The only way to improve propagation delay is to move the content closer to the destination. In order to have the content close to the demand, we store multiple copies and search multiple locations, thus trading off storage, bandwidth, and processing for lower propagation delay. The computing world should re-evaluate these trade-offs because the situation has changed. We need an Internet that is designed for the technologies used today, rather than the tools of the 20th century. CCFS, which regards the trade-off for lower propagation delay, will be better suited for 21st-century technologies. Although CCFS is not preferable in all situations, it can still offer tremendous value. Better robustness, performance, and democracy make CCFS a contribution to the field. Robustness comes from the cryptographic assurances provided by the five properties of CCFS. Performance comes from the locality of content. Democracy arises from the lack of a centralized authority that may grant the right of Free Speech only to those who espouse rhetoric compatible with their ideals. Combined, this model for a cryptographically secure, content-centric system provides a novel contribution to the state of communications technology and information security.

Moderating With Humans, For Humans - Trust Issues

Moderating With Humans, For Humans - Trust Issues

You can just review things: A digital ethnography of informal peer review

Across scholarly communities, manuscripts face similar evaluative rituals: editors invite experts to privately assess submissions through formal peer reviews. This closed, loosely structured, and...

Trust Conference - Thomson Reuters Foundation

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