Trust, Play, and Platforms: Sharing Lessons for Safer Digital Spaces
May 2026
Video games are a mainstream cultural force, but they remain largely absent from mainstream debates about digital rights and online safety. Our paper examines how Trust & Safety governance in online gaming compares to social media, tracing shared challenges around content moderation, pro-social design, and cross-platform harms. Drawing on expert reflections from a September 2025 symposium co-hosted by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and American University’s Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology, the paper offers a framework for understanding how the governance of online games can inform digital policy more broadly.
At a time when regulators, platforms, and civil society are grappling with generative AI, rising compliance requirements, and the shrinking of Trust & Safety teams across the tech sector, the paper highlights what the games industry’s unique experience with community-driven moderation and pro-social design can teach policymakers and advocates working across all digital spaces.
The paper concludes with a set of practical observations for how the gaming and social media industries, researchers, and policymakers can work together to build safer digital spaces for all users.
- Play is a human right, articulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, requiring a careful balance between user autonomy and meaningful safety oversight.
- Rehabilitative approaches to moderation outperform punitive ones, with nudges toward pro-social norms proving more effective than bans in sustaining healthy online communities.
- Generative AI is changing Trust & Safety in both gaming and social media, introducing novel moderation challenges that existing frameworks are not yet equipped to handle.
- Compulsive use of gaming deserves holistic regulatory attention, raising questions about whether harm-specific rules or broader safeguards are the more effective path.
- Age verification alone is not sufficient to protect children online. Meaningful protection requires harm-specific regulations targeting profit models, design features, and accountability mechanisms.
- Greater transparency and cross-industry collaboration are essential, as the most pressing harms move fluidly across games, social media, livestreaming, and messaging platforms.
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