grassroots knowledge. global action.
Building the future of online safety from the ground up starts with listening to and learning from the people closest to harm. This is where we share what we have gathered so far.
The SHIELD Global Online Safety Conference brings together practitioners, researchers, young people, and community leaders to map where digital harm originates and what it actually takes to address it. These documents are the permanent record of that work.
80 speakers. 25 countries. 5 continents. Three days of sessions, testimony, and argument examined for structural patterns.
Click on the images below to download the documents. Main findings from the documents are summarized in our blog (see below).
A short introduction to the conference, its findings, and SHIELD's position on what the evidence requires.
A structured synthesis of the reference document: what the conference found, who said it, and what it means for the field.
The complete record: session summaries, practitioner voices, frameworks, tools, and a full index for locating specific contributions.
Removing threat and building the capacity to navigate it are two different jobs, and doing only the first leaves people less equipped every time protection falls short.
Infrastructure built for people instead of with them isn’t just an equity failure, it’s a technical one: the designers never had access to the information required to get it right.
Safety responses consistently concentrate where harm is visible to institutions, not where it actually originates.
A system that can point to reports filed, policies published, and audits passed isn’t necessarily a system that makes anyone safer.
Online safety work runs on two separate approaches that rarely talk to each other. This post looks at what happens in the gap between them, and why it matters.
Some of the most important lessons about online harm come from practitioners working directly with affected communities, not from a distance. Here’s what that approach makes possible.
SHIELD convenes gatherings throughout the year across formats and geographies.
Click on the images below to access the dedicated event page.
A three-day conference examining why online harm persists and what it actually takes to address it, bringing together practitioners, educators, young people, researchers, and community leaders working across harm types, disciplines, and regions to map both the structural conditions producing harm and the ground-level responses already working to address it.
A three-day conference examining why online harm persists and what it actually takes to address it, bringing together practitioners, educators, young people, researchers, and community leaders working across harm types, disciplines, and regions to map both the structural conditions producing harm and the ground-level responses already working to address it.
A focused examination of AI-powered tools entering mental health care, exploring the ethical, clinical, and practical questions they raise: who they serve, what risks they carry for vulnerable users including young people and the elderly, and what responsible design and deployment in this space actually requires.
A close look at the growing use of AI chatbot companions, covering the psychological mechanisms that drive attachment, the societal conditions that make people turn to them, the specific risks they pose to children and vulnerable adults, and what it means to engage with them without losing sight of their limitations.
A dedicated day of conversation led by young people from five countries, speaking on their own terms about how they experience the online world, what adults consistently get wrong about it, and how they are already building their own approaches to staying well within it.
SHIELD's first annual conference, covering the full landscape of online harm including child safety, content moderation labor, data privacy, platform accountability, trafficking, digital literacy, and the experiences of communities whose specific realities are rarely centered in mainstream safety conversations.
