Summary
- Trust and Safety Tycoon is a choice-based simulator game that educates players about the challenges and policy decisions involved in managing trust and safety on a social media platform.
- The game emphasizes the difficulty of making the right choices, such as balancing ethics and ad revenue, and managing content moderators while avoiding bankruptcy.
- While the game is thought-provoking and illuminates the power of social media platforms to impact society, it also raises concerns about giving too much leniency to real-life corporations like Twitter.
I started playing Trust and Safety Tycoo⭕n last week, and after crashing and burning during my first year of working at the fictional company, I gave up. Until yesterday that is, when I finally managed to beat the game with a four-star rating. The choice-based simulator game gives you multiple situations to deal with, and your actions have impacts on us🌄er growth, ad revenue, moderator speed, and team morale. From blogger , it’s an attempt to inform people about what trust and safety on a social media platform entails and the kind of policy decisions you have to make. It doesn’t shirk away from putting difficult choices in front of you, which is part of what makes it so compelling.
Turns out I’m very bad at managing ad revenue and moderator speed, because I want to do the best possible job. That means I’m more inclined to forgo advertising for ethics, and I want my team to do as in-depth a job as possible, even if that means it takܫes more time. Trust and Safety Tycoon teaches you that wanting to do the right thing isn’t as easy as it seems. It’s easy to piss off advertisers and run your busine🐻ss into the ground, and it’s easy to overwork a small team of content moderators when you’re trying to juggle so many plates at once.
Alan Wake 2's Musical Number Is My Favourite Gaming Moment Of The Year
Remedy had no right to go this hard. But it did, and I apꦆplaud them.
By the end of my first year, ad revenue was in the pits – by the end of the third, I’d managed to win some advertising back bu♊t my mo🐲derator speed was dipping almost below zero. Doing things like protecting your users’ data and stopping governments from interfering in your business is incredibly difficult when you’re also trying to stop your company going bankrupt and your CEO getting pissy.
I have mixed feelings about Trust and Safety Tycoon. On one hand, it’s a fun, thought-provoking interpretation of what it must be like to run a social media platform. It probes you to consider the good that can be done with such a thing, like spreading awareness about natural disasters and protecting activists, as well as the evil you can unwittingly abet, ꦜlike overlooking political radicalisation and becoming complicit in genocide by not reacting fast enough to threats or emboldening the sources of fake news.
But on the other hand, I worry that it gives corporations too much grace. Yapper, the platform you are moderating, is an obvious analogue for Twitter, except you’re shaping Yapper from its early days as a social media startup. It’s easy to play this game and start thinking that perhaps we should forgive Twitter for all its stupid decisions, including changing its name, throwing the verification model out the window, and allowing the proliferation of spam and bots. Surely they didn’t 🥃make these decisions lightly, right?
If we’re so stressed out trying to make the right choices here, it must be harder in the real world where we can’t reverse our decisions if we don’t like the consequences. But then I remember that Elon Musk is a fool who purchased a company on a whim, not someone who cares about making the world better and protecting his employees. Twitter isn’t Yapper, or at least, it isn’🌱t anymore.
Trust and Safety Tycoon isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s an interesting exercise in examining the many factors that go into a social media platform’s policies. Using Twitter, at times, feels entirely frivolous – I go on, I scroll through my little memes, I have a chuckle, I log off. But the power of these platforms to feed into election disinformation, disenfranchise oppressed people, and radicalise people to violent acts cannot be understated, and Trust and Safety Tycoon highlights ꦅthat in a fun, easily consumable way. For that in itself, it’s commendable.