Alice Hunsberger: On AI, inclusion and where T&S goes next

Welcome to the second episode of T&S Pro Voices! Today, we're thrilled to share Alice Hunsberger's story. If you've been in the Trust and Safety space for any amount of time, you already know Alice. With 15+ years in the field, she's led T&S at OkCupid and Grindr navigating complex policy and operational challenges at scale. She's one of those names that comes up again and again: as a leader, as a mentor, as someone whose work has shaped how the industry thinks about inclusive moderation and the future of the field. Given her prominence and influence in the space, we specifically invited Alice to share her journey with us - and after recently working together on the Safe for Work? series by Everything in Moderation, it's especially nice to reconnect. This is a conversation you're going to want to bookmark.

About yourself, your journey, what sparked your interest, and memorable challenges

I'm Alice Hunsberger, Head of Trust & Safety at Musubi, an AI solutions company for T&S teams. I'm the resident T&S expert, and help lead strategy, product, marketing, and customer success. I also co-author the Trust & Safety Insider newsletter with Everything in Moderation.

My path into T&S was not a straight line. My first career was actually in documentary film and TV editing, which is funny because it's also a job where you're organizing massive amounts of material and trying to make a coherent story out of it. I think I've always had this instinct for building taxonomies and classification systems: the throughline from documentary editing to T&S policy work is organizing chaos, building frameworks, drawing lines.

The T&S thread started when I was a teenager. I was obsessively cataloging and indexing rare vinyl records, and I ran an online forum for trading them. That's where I first encountered the need for online governance: I had to write the forum's guidelines, moderate disputes, figure out what was and wasn't okay. I had no idea that was going to become a career.

Then in 2009, the recession hit and I needed a part-time job on top of my editing work. I joined OkCupid as one of their earliest moderators, and I found tech so fascinating that I never looked back. I became their first customer support hire, built and grew the moderation and CS teams, and managed T&S through the company's acquisition by Match Group.

From there I moved to Grindr as VP of CX and Trust & Safety, where I ran the T&S and customer support teams during the ramp-up to IPO. I never thought I'd end up as an exec at a public company, so being there at the stock exchange for that moment was pretty surreal. After Grindr, I went to PartnerHero, which is a BPO, as VP of T&S and Content Moderation. That gave me a completely different perspective: seeing the work from the outsourcing and operations side. And now at Musubi, I'm building AI-powered tools that help platforms operationalize their T&S.

So the arc has been: platform-side to vendor-side to building the tools themselves.

As for memorable challenges: there are a few that stand out. One is the constant work of making the case for T&S. Over 13 years across two dating platforms, I saw multiple leadership changes, and with each one the attitude toward T&S shifted. Sometimes it was central to the product. Sometimes it was a cost center. The work and the team didn't change: the priorities at the top did. Another challenge was the fun but unique work of scaling safety for the LGBTQ+ community, where the stakes are different and the context really matters. And then there's just the reality of scaling and growing teams through periods of rapid change, IPOs, acquisitions, all of it.

How has T&S evolved? Trends that excite you?

I've been doing this work since 2002 in various forms, and the biggest shift has been the move from reactive to proactive. When I started, moderation was basically whack-a-mole. You saw something bad, you dealt with it. Over time, the field evolved toward policy frameworks, tooling, automation, and now AI-powered systems that can work proactively at scale.

What excites me most right now is AI, but not just AI as tooling. I mean all of it. Using Claude conversationally, agents through OpenClaw, LLMs for content classification, agentic AI for holistic moderation: it's unlocking so much for T&S teams. Things I couldn't do easily six months ago are a snap now. And I hate to sound like an AI hype bro, but it's really true.

I can trace my excitement to a specific moment: in 2022, Dave Willner invited me to do some red teaming for OpenAI. That's when I started to see the possibilities, not just AI as a threat vector for T&S, but as something that could fundamentally transform how we do the work.

A project or moment you're especially proud of?

The project I'm most proud of is the "Best Practices for Gender-Inclusive Content Moderation" report that I co-authored with Lily Galib and Vanity Brown while I was at Grindr. We put that out in 2021. It filled a real gap: there was nothing like it. It wasn't a theoretical paper. It had actionable tips for operations and product teams on designing and maintaining inclusive spaces.

What makes me most proud is the staying power. Just last week at the Trust & Safety Summit in London, someone came up to me and told me it's been like a "bible" for policy best practices in this area. That's five years later. When you put something out into the world and people are still referencing it as a core resource years down the line, that tells you it hit something real.

Standardizing team names and structures?

Here's my hot take: the naming chaos, Trust & Safety vs. Integrity vs. Content Moderation vs. Policy vs. Risk, actually reflects real structural differences in how companies organize this work. So I'm not sure standardization in the traditional sense is the right goal.

But I think the question itself is about to get a lot more complicated, in a good way. My prediction is that as T&S evolves, it's going to integrate more deeply with AI safety, cybersecurity, AI governance, compliance, and even product teams. T&S has been siloed for a long time, partly because the work was built around human moderation, which was a distinct function that sat apart from everything else. But as AI gets embedded in everything, T&S will naturally need to integrate into every other system and team in a way it never has before.

So rather than standardizing the name, I think the profession will mature and the boundaries will blur. And that's actually a good thing.

Advice for newcomers?

Get hands-on. Volunteer to moderate, do the work, understand what it feels like on the front lines. Build community: find your people through TSPA, TrustCon, the broader T&S community. Be curious about adjacent fields like security, product, policy, data science, because T&S doesn't exist in a vacuum.

And lean into AI. It can unlock things for you and accelerate your learning and impact in a meaningful way. Entry-level T&S people with the right mindset, curiosity, collaboration, skepticism, a focus on ethics and equitable outcomes, can do more than ever before. I hope the days of "paying your dues" by slogging through endless traumatic content day after day like a robot are over. AI can and should change that.

A big thank you to Alice for sharing her journey, insights, and vision with us! From moderating vinyl trading forums as a teenager to shaping inclusive moderation practices that the industry still relies on years later, her career is proof that Trust and Safety isn't just one thing. It's a discipline that evolves with you. What makes Alice's story especially powerful is that she's never just observed the field from one angle; she's lived it from the platform side, the vendor side, and now the builder side, all while pushing for a future where AI lifts the burden off human moderators rather than simply scaling their workload. For anyone looking to understand where T&S has been and where it's headed, Alice is exactly the voice to list.

If you're a Trust and Safety professional with a story to tell, we'd love to hear from you. Simply fill out the form here. We'll review your submission and be in touch if we'd like to feature your story.

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