Introducing the Spotify Safety Advisory Council
Over the past several months, Spotify has moved to being more transparent about our safety efforts. In January, we published our Platform Rules and took measures to ensure that creators on our platform view and adhere to them. These were first steps forward, and today we unveil another: our newly formed Spotify Safety Advisory Council—the first safety-focused council of its type at any major audio company.
The founding members of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council are individuals and organizations around the world with deep expertise in areas that are key to navigating the online safety space. At a high level, the council’s mission is to help Spotify evolve its policies and products in a safe way while making sure we respect creator expression. Our council members will advise our teams in key areas like policy and safety-feature development as well as guide our approach to equity, impact, and academic research. Council members will not make enforcement decisions about specific content or creators. However, their feedback will inform how we shape our high-level policies and the internal processes our teams follow to ensure that policies are applied consistently and at scale around the world.
While Spotify has been seeking feedback from many of these founding members for years, we’re excited to further expand and be more transparent about our safety partnerships. As our product continues to grow and evolve, council membership will grow and evolve along with it. In the months ahead, we will work closely with founding members to expand the council, with the goal of broadening regional and linguistic representation as well as adding additional experts in the equity and impact space.
The founding members and partner organizations include the following:
Dangerous Speech Project, represented by Professor Susan Benesch and Tonei Glavinic
Center for Democracy and Technology, represented by Emma Llansó
Professor Danielle Citron
Dr. Mary Anne Franks
Alex Holmes
Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), represented by Henry Tuck and Milo Comerford
Dr. Jonas Kaiser
Kinzen, represented by Founders Mark Little and Áine Kerr
Dr. Ronaldo Lemos
Dr. Christer Mattsson
Dr. Tanu Mitra
Desmond Upton Patton, PhD, MSW
Megan Phelps-Roper
USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, represented by Dr. Katherine Pieper and Dr. Stacy L. Smith
You can read the full bios for the organizations and individuals here.
