We always begin these pieces by emphasizing how essential Trust & Safety teams are to the integrity of digital platforms. From frontline Content Moderators to policy leads, analysts, and operational managers, these teams uphold the boundaries of truth and protect online communities from harm. But when it comes to moderating misinformation and disinformation, the psychological and operational toll is uniquely complex – and too often overlooked.
Misinformation and disinformation may not be as visually graphic as egregious content, but they carry their own weight. Content that deliberately misleads, polarizes, or manipulates – particularly around topics like elections, war, and public health places T&S professionals in high-stakes, high-pressure roles that demand constant cognitive vigilance and emotional balance.
Why Generic Resilience Programs Don’t Cut It
Most workplace resilience programs are not built for the reality of Trust & Safety work. And certainly not for the nuanced, fast-moving challenges of misinformation and disinformation. These teams face:
- Cognitive Dissonance and Decision Fatigue: Reviewing content where the line between fact and fiction is blurred can lead to mental exhaustion, indecision, and the slow erosion of confidence.
- Ideological Exposure: Constant exposure to extreme views, conspiracy theories, and cultural misinformation can have subtle but cumulative effects on identity, empathy, and sense of belonging.
- Public Pressure and Internal Conflict: T&S professionals often operate under intense scrutiny – from regulators, the media, internal stakeholders, and users – while also navigating fast-changing internal policies and sometimes contradictory expectations.
- Burnout from Chronic Ambiguity: Unlike clearly harmful content, misinformation requires deeper, more analytical review. It rarely offers black-and-white decisions, leading to continuous emotional and cognitive strain.
Whether reviewing content, building policy, or handling appeals, the emotional labour across T&S roles is real and it requires more than a basic wellness app or one-off session.
Why Resilience Is an Operational Imperative
When resilience is treated as an individual personality trait rather than a core part of organisational infrastructure, it’s easy to miss the bigger picture.
Resilience, in the context of Trust & Safety, is not just about bouncing back – it’s about maintaining clarity, emotional regulation, and decision-making stamina in highly complex and evolving digital environments.
Resilient teams are more likely to:
- Stay grounded in fast-moving content spikes or crises
- Maintain consistency across subjective or grey-area decisions
- Sustain empathy without burning out
- Collaborate more effectively across functions like policy, legal, and moderation
- Flag potential psychosocial risks before they escalate
And perhaps most critically – they’re more likely to stay. T&S burnout is real. When resilience isn’t intentionally built into systems and support structures, turnover increases, institutional knowledge is lost, and teams struggle to maintain quality under pressure.
Resilience Starts with Understanding: Assess Before You Address
Building a resilient T&S team starts with one critical question: where are your people right now?
At Zevo, our Resilience Assessment provides a structured way to answer that. It offers both quantitative and qualitative insights into how your T&S staff are doing – especially those working within high-impact workflows like misinformation.
We assess key indicators like:
- Compassion fatigue and satisfaction
- Burnout
- Resilience
- Depression, anxiety, trauma
- Risk of harm to self or others
This data, combined with semi-structured interviews and psychometric tools (like ProQOL, CD-RISC, and CORE34), helps organisations flag at-risk individuals, understand team-wide pressure points, and take pre-emptive action.
We’ve seen this used effectively:
- At the launch of new high-risk workflows, such as those focused on mis/disinformation
- When onboarding new hires into sensitive or ambiguous review environments
- In response to regulatory shifts that put additional scrutiny on T&S decision-making
- Post-incident, to support recovery and ensure sustainable reintegration
A Safer Digital Space Starts with Safer Teams
As the digital landscape grows more polarised, AI-generated, and politically charged, the burden on Trust & Safety will only increase. We cannot expect people to stand at the fault lines of the internet without the right psychological support.
Investing in resilience isn’t about softening the impact of harmful content – it’s about fortifying the people who protect the integrity of our platforms every day.
Before we think about training, upskilling, or policy updates, we need to understand where our teams stand. And that starts with asking the right questions – and truly listening to the answers.
