Why your Trust & Safety team should work with marketing

By all accounts, trust and safety is having a moment. Long relegated to the back office or crisis comms playbook, it’s now emerging as a core brand differentiator. But while the world catches up with the idea that online platforms need better content moderation, there’s still one odd divide: why do trust and safety teams and marketing departments rarely speak to each other?

It’s a question that Deniz Alkan, Director of Reviews at Trustpilot, wants more businesses to ask.

“There’s some really interesting data and some really good insights in companies’ transparency reports,” she says. “But they just live on the corporate site – it’s not something someone goes and searches for unless they’re particularly interested.”

In an age of algorithmic scroll and short attention spans, that’s a missed opportunity. According to Alkan, brands need to stop treating trust and safety like a niche legal compliance issue and start recognizing its marketing potential – both for building customer loyalty and for standing out in crowded markets.

Trust and safety: from cost center to brand asset

For many companies, trust and safety is still seen as a backend function. It’s there to handle escalations, take down harmful content, enforce platform policies, and occasionally, apologise after something’s gone wrong. But that limited view, Alkan argues, is outdated – and potentially risky.

“Trust and safety shouldn’t be something that comes after you actually get the customer,” she says. “It should be part of your branding strategy. It should be part of your core business strategy.”

It’s not just theory. Brands that downplay safety in the name of growth often end up paying the price. In other words: if your platform isn’t safe, your brand isn’t either.

Transparency reports are marketing gold – if anyone reads them

Over the past few years, transparency reports have become a staple for platforms trying to show their trust and safety credentials. But these documents can sometimes be restricted in their formats and fail to reach the people they’re meant to.

“Transparency reports are good, but they’re not easily digestible,” says Alkan. “We’re in the age of video now. Why not create short videos that highlight what your company’s doing really well in trust and safety?”

It’s a classic marketing job: take complex internal data, humanize it, and put it in front of the right audience in the right format. And it’s exactly the kind of thing that marketing and trust and safety could – and should – collaborate on.

Showcase the wins, not just the crises

Another reason marketing tends to overlook trust and safety? The optics. Too often, trust and safety is only mentioned in a crisis: a moderation failure, a viral complaint, a public apology.

“We only ever hear the negative stories,” says Alkan. “But you don’t really see the other side – the users who were protected, or the decisions that prevented harm.”

That’s a storytelling failure. Trust and safety teams are full of insights that could make for powerful brand content. Think: customer stories where intervention made a difference, stats on abusive content blocked before it went live, or examples of community-led moderation that actually worked.

Trustpilot, for instance, recently invited a partner company to share how it used review insights to overhaul its customer experience – raising its Trustpilot score from 1.4 to over 4.5 in just a couple of years. “They talked about how they leveraged the feedback and turned around people’s perception,” says Alkan. “That’s a story worth telling.”

Aligning on tone: what your brand feels like in a crisis

Tone of voice isn’t just for ads and social posts, it’s also how you reply to a flagged review, respond to an abuse report, or explain to a user why their content was taken down.

“People don’t see it as, ‘I’m contacting the trust and safety team.’ They just see it as the company,” Alkan points out. “So it’s really important to be consistent.”

Marketing teams are often the brand voice experts, but trust and safety teams are the ones on the front lines of emotionally charged situations. A smart company makes sure both are aligned – ideally before a crisis hits.

“It needs to be decided early: are you going to send templated responses or take a more personalized approach? How scalable is that?” says Alkan. “Users want to feel heard. That matters more than the outcome sometimes.”

Shared goals, different tools

At their core, trust and safety and marketing are both about perception. One protects your brand’s reputation from harm. The other builds it. And both can benefit from the same foundational elements: transparency, empathy, storytelling, and a feedback loop that listens to real users.

So why the disconnect?

“Usually, the trust and safety and marketing teams aren’t talking to each other,” says Alkan. “But they should be, because the insights that trust and safety is generating are actually part of how you tell your story as a business.”

The call to action here isn’t to turn moderators into content creators – or vice versa. It’s to create a bridge. Marketing teams should be mining trust and safety for data and stories that build credibility. And trust and safety teams should be working with marketers to make sure their efforts don’t go unseen.

Final thought: trust is a brand strategy

For platforms trying to grow in 2025, safety isn’t a side issue. It’s central to customer experience, user retention, and even investor confidence. And if you’re not already building cross-functional partnerships between your trust and safety and marketing teams, you’re leaving a huge opportunity on the table.

“Users are smarter now,” says Alkan. “They want to see that you care – and they know how to tell when you don’t.”