This repository contains an open source textbook focused on Trust and Safety principles, practices, and techniques and was initially created to facilitate the CS/COMM/INTLPOL Trust and Safety course at Stanford University. We are releasing it publicly as a resource to other educators who wish to teach this subject, including our colleagues in the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium as well as a tool for professionals, policy makers, and individuals who wish to educate themselves about some of the critical technology issues of the moment.
🚧 Work in Progress 🚧
This textbook is currently under active development. Chapters may be incomplete, and content is subject to change as the field evolves. We appreciate your patience and contributions during this development phase.
Our current outline for the textbook is as follows:
- Chapter 1 - Introduction to Trust and Safety
- Chapter 2 - Spam and Online Fraud
- Chapter 3 - Tech Tools: Cryptography
- Chapter 4 - Surveillance, Oppression, and Censorship
- Chapter 5 - Tech Tools: Machine Learning
- Chapter 6 - Online Harassment
- Chapter 7 - Child Sexual Exploitation
- Chapter 8 - Incitement and Terrorism
- Chapter 9 - Abusing AI
- Chapter 10 - Misinformation and Disinformation
- Chapter 11 - Safety in the Sharing Economy
- Chapter 12 - Conclusion and Future Directions
The textbook will be primarily available and edited in markdown format and can be read directly on GitHub or downloaded for offline use. We're working to make various formats available (PDF, EPUB, etc.) as the project matures.
We welcome contributions from subject matter experts, practitioners, educators, and students! Here's how you can help:
- Content Contributions: Submit new chapters, case studies, or exercises
- Corrections: Fix errors or outdated information
- Enhancements: Improve existing content with additional examples, references, or clarifications
- Translations: We eventually want to make this resource available in other languages, through a combination of machine translation and human editing
Please see our CONTRIBUTING.md file for detailed guidelines on how to contribute.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
This means you are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes . ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits
Please see the Creative Commons BY-NA-SA license page for more details
For questions or suggestions about this project, please open an issue or contact the project maintainers at feedback@tsbook.org.
We would like to thank all contributors and supporters who have made this project possible, those great colleagues and students with whom we have worked with and learned from over the decades, and the many people whose experiences we have tried to document in this work.