Integrity Guidance for Start Ups and Early Stage Companies
Integrity Institute releases a guide for early stage companies to integrate integrity into their platform design
No social media app wants to become known as a center for awful content. There are plenty of cautionary tales about apps that have been suspended, or never came to be, because of concerns about proliferating harmful content and bad actors.
The reality is bad behavior and bad actors are inevitable on social media platforms.
Without building in integrity, platforms are vulnerable to harmful content and bad behavior becoming established and amplified on their services. This creates a downward spiral: weak responses to bad behavior leads to more bad actors, which expands the audience for harmful content on the platform, begetting more bad actors… and when things don’t improve, good actors and regular users will start to leave. This leads to stagnation for the platform: with only bad actors and bad press about the content on the platform, there is no path to growth.
A new resource released by the Integrity Institute aims to provide companies facing these challenges guidance on how to address them early, build in integrity systems from the start, and get to a healthy platform growth cycle, which sets the company up for long-term success through:
Promoting and sustaining company growth
Ensuring a healthy and safe user community
Reducing brand risk
This guide will be useful to companies in early stages of growth, those just starting to see bad behaviors crop up on their platforms, or those with limited resources and experience in the integrity space.
The guide, Build in Integrity: Best Practices for Start Ups and Early Stage Companies, provides seven actions towards a strong integrity system, with case studies and best practices for each stage:
The guide advises platforms to approach integrity by starting with their values, and figuring out what trust and safety mean for their platform. This sets up the platform to focus its integrity work on areas that are relevant for its goals. By understanding what the platform values, platforms can make choices at the design stage that limit risk and incentivize good behavior in ways that are relevant for that specific platform. This resource includes some best practices for designing with integrity, and understanding the platform’s particular vulnerabilities relative to design choices.
Beyond design, this resource also offers insights into writing and enforcing policies for behavior on platforms – importantly recognizing that these things do not have to be complex at the start and can grow with the platform. Similarly, it provides ways to monitor those enforcements and iterate based on performance, crucial for any platform in an early stage.
By starting out with integrity in mind, considering best practices, and using resources and examples that are out there (new platforms don’t have to reinvent the wheel!), start up social media companies and platforms thinking about integrity concerns, can be better equipped to handle these challenges and ensure healthy, long-term platform growth.
