Earlier in the day i came across a post that made me fairly frustrated and i felt like i should respond to the post in question. But i knew i shouldn’t, not just because i know better than to respond in a moment of frustration but because i also knew that i wouldn’t “win” any argument i got engaged with.
The idea or intention isn’t “to win” but i mean this in the sense of being able to successfully carry out your intended goal, i.e make people understand the circumstances, decisions and thinking that is involved in an outcome that they, and understandably so, likely take personal. That’s never a battle that you’ll “win” by just making a single comment.
As a member of a Trust & Safety team, specially one for a social media platform, there seems to be little merit to take on tackling individual issues or specific topics. There just seems to be far too many pitfalls for it to be worth it. But surely attempting it is worth it at least, no?
Any attempt you might make might be seen as damage control, or as an attempt to explain away the harm that they personally feel. It’s their account, site, blog, profile, content, etc. And once you’re placed in that position, your intent stops mattering very quickly.
The conversation stops being about understanding and starts being about accounting. About tallying failures. About what about this and what about that. About all the other things that weren’t addressed, couldn’t be addressed, or never will be addressed in a single reply, post, or explanation.
Maybe that’s the crux of it all? It’s not like Trust & Safety work really lends itself to being explained in fragments. It’s a discipline built on trade-offs, constraints, working with partial information, and outcomes that often feel deeply personal to the people affected by them. Trying to compress all of that into a comment thread feels less like transparency and more like inviting misunderstanding.
But knowing that, and then responding to that, are two very different things. You can acknowledge harm without being able to resolve it and at the same time you can care deeply and still be unable to offer a satisfying answer.
So i think the question becomes less “should someone/i speak up?” and more “what is speaking up actually meant to do?”. If the goal is to win trust, or to make that difference between expectation and reality more clearer, then speaking up rarely succeeds. If the goal is to add some sort of context to an otherwise opaque system then maybe that has some value, even if it never feels like enough.
For now, i am not convinced that speaking up would fix much, but i’m also not entirely comfortable with saying nothing at all. I suppose i land somewhere in between, trying to sit with the tension rather than resolve it outright.