Debora Maistrello: Building Trust and Safety from scratch
Welcome to the fifth episode of T&S Pro Voices! This time we're featuring Debora, a Trust and Safety Operations professional who has led safety frameworks for global platforms with millions of active users, including Meetup and komoot. But what makes Debora's story particularly compelling is the context she operates in. Based in Italy, she's working in a market where Trust and Safety as a function is barely recognised, often confused with physical workplace safety or IT security, and where dedicated roles are virtually non-existent. Her story is about doing serious, high-stakes T&S work while simultaneously making the case that it needs to exist at all. It's a new perspective in our industry and it’s definitely worth listening.
What's your journey into Trust and Safety?
I entered Trust and Safety at a at a key moment for an important Italian tech company. After acquiring several platforms with millions of active users, it became clear that protecting those digital communities was a critical priority. We needed to tackle everything from everyday abuse - spam, scams, phishing - to high-risk issues like platform violence and child safety. Working on these critical issues made a huge impact on how I approach user safety.
How has your background shaped the way you approach T&S?
Starting my career in Customer Support gave me a solid foundation in active listening, triage, and handling urgent, high-severity escalation workflows under pressure. From there, I expanded into legal and compliance frameworks - the EU Digital Services Act, the UK Online Safety Act, the emerging AI Act. Those two things together - the operational instinct and the regulatory literacy - have become the lens through which I approach everything in this field.
You've worked in a market where T&S is still a relatively new concept. What's that experience being like?
In markets like Italy, "safety" is still mostly associated with physical workplace safety rather than digital protection. Trust & Safety as a dedicated role and function is virtually non-existent, which creates a significant gap in local platform governance. For Italian T&S professionals, this means limited local opportunities and intense competition for international roles at platforms like Meta or TikTok. It's a real structural challenge and it makes raising awareness locally not just a professional responsibility, but an urgent one.
How do you go about raising awareness of T&S in a market where the concept is still misunderstood?
The core issue is a complete lack of familiarity with the function itself. People either don't know this role exists, or they confuse it with Security, IT, or physical safety at work. I don't think the answer is to rename Trust & Safety to fit local habits but to educate the market that this function exists and is necessary.
That means clearly explaining what T&S actually solves: protecting users from harm, stopping abusive behavior, moderating dangerous content, and creating safe digital environments. It means showing that the most important international platforms thrive because they treat safety as aproduct feature. And it means T&S professionals being willing to talk openly about their work - sharing what their teamsdo every day, making the invisiblevisible. That last part is something I'm still learning myself.
How do you measure success in T&S and do you think the industry is measuring the right things?
Trust & Safety is an invisible function: when everything goes right, nobody notices. But when something goes wrong, the real-world impact can be immediate and severe.
To stay invisible while handling massive volumes of reports, AI has to act as a primary filter. Low-severity issues like spam, scams, and phishing can largely be automated through machine learning. But keeping a human in the loop remains essential for edge cases, anomalies, and spikes - we cannot delegate 100% of this work to AI. The human role doesn't disappear; it evolves from manual execution to high-level architecture. AI should also serve as an early-warning system for high-severity cases that require resolution within minutes, triggering alerts so human specialists can investigate, decide, and act immediately.
Because the industry is still young, standard metrics often focus on volume or speed rather than long-term risk mitigation. In my view, the industry needs to pay much closer attention to three critical areas: stricter age verification and protection of minors, zero tolerance for online violence and hate, and fighting coordinated disinformation. We are still at the very beginning of defining what true success looks like in digital safety.
What's your advice for someone starting out in T&S - particularly those coming from non-traditional backgrounds?
Go all in. Trust & Safety is much more than moderation or support - it's about protecting real people behind the screens. You have a direct opportunity to prevent real-world harm, educate users, and make platforms safer. It's challenging, but deeply impactful. For real.
Thank you to Debora for sharing her story and her perspective so openly. What makes her voice so valuable to this series is exactly the angle nobody else has brought: the experience of building and championing T&S in a market that hasn't caught up yet. The challenges she describes - the invisibility of the function, the lack of local opportunity, the need to educate before you can even begin to hire - are challenges the whole industry should pay attention to, because today's emerging markets are tomorrow's major platforms. T&S doesn't stop at borders, and neither should the conversation about it.
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.