This is the fifth installment in our series: “20 Years in Online Safety: Reflecting, Evolving, and Adapting,” leading to the 20th anniversary of Resolver’s presence in the Trust & Safety community on Nov. 25, 2025. Originally launched as Crisp Thinking in 2005, we’ve had multiple generations of online safety professionals carry the mission forward. For this series, we asked our team, managers, and leadership to reflect on the journey we’ve taken so far and the road ahead, as we continue in our core mission to protect children online.
When we joined Resolver in 2018, we were immediately drawn to its mission and dedication to protecting children online, the heart of why the company was founded. We were excited to be part of a team whose purpose had expanded to safeguarding platforms and users from a wide range of global risks — from violent extremism to harmful or illegal content — across every corner of the world. Knowing our work would have a real impact on protecting children, users, and platforms from online harm gave us a strong daily purpose.
What we did not realize then was that we had joined at the start of a major transformation — a shift that would redefine how we, and the wider Trust and Safety industry, understand and apply predictive online safety in threat prevention.
The end of firefighting: Why reactive safety failed
Traditionally, Trust & Safety has operated in a reactive mode. It was a seemingly endless cycle of firefighting, where teams triaged and reported harmful content after it had already affected users and platforms. Efforts focused on identifying existing risks and enforcing against them.
While essential, this approach left all of us playing a disadvantageous game of reaction against an ever-evolving threat landscape. We quickly understood that relying on post-incident analysis was unsustainable, dangerous, and outdated because it was fundamentally a game of catch-up.
The speed and virality of content mean that a single piece of malicious material can spiral into a full-blown crisis in minutes. Content can be instantly downloaded, shared, and spread across platforms, causing irreversible harm to users and brands.
We knew there had to be a better way.
Building a culture of foresight
Resolver’s evolution began with a mindset shift: moving from reporting what had happened to anticipating what could happen next.
Our teams began developing predictive safety technologies and analytical systems designed to detect the earliest signs of emerging risk — often before anyone else saw them. This capability is driven by a unique combination of our exceptional analysts and innovative tools. We’ll talk about our people later, but first, let’s look at our technology.
We use predictive safety technologies — specialized intelligence platforms — to conduct continuous risk scanning and detect the first signals of emerging risk across social media, the wider web, and the dark web before a threat becomes unmanageable. These early signals are immediately assessed, turned into an intelligence product, and shared with the relevant partner.
Our dedicated systems, powered by our analysts, are the core mechanism that allows us to move beyond reactive approaches.
At the heart of this capability is a dynamic, multi-layered lexicon. This library is continuously updated and refined by our risk analysts to ensure maximum signal detection of both overt and covert threats. Given the constantly evolving nature of online risks, these queries are updated frequently to:
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Integrate emerging risks and new bad-actor terminology, ensuring our system doesn’t rely on outdated terms. |
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Identify sophisticated evasion techniques (such as leetspeak, intentional misspellings, or coded language) used to bypass automated detection and filtering, maintaining the integrity and effectiveness of our platform safety measures. |
This systematic approach provides a real-time, preemptive layer of defense, ensuring our clients are forearmed with actionable intelligence. We communicate and report on risks at the earliest stage of their lifecycle through a range of intelligence products, from real-time alerts, which are short, concise updates for immediate risk dissemination, to longer-form structured reports that present complex threat findings in a clear, actionable way.
Every new signal, no matter how small, helps our clients take action before threats materialize.
Seamless synergy: How expert collaboration enables proactive protection
At Resolver, the collective human intelligence of our experts is the core of how we safeguard our clients and the users on their platforms. We’ve worked hard to move swiftly and effectively beyond a simple spot-and-delete approach, delivering a proactive, layered response to complex risks.
Our analysts and subject matter experts (SMEs) possess deep knowledge across critical risk areas, including child safety, suicide and self-harm, violent extremism, graphic violence, hate speech, harassment, misinformation and disinformation, and adult or harmful and dangerous content. This broad expertise ensures we proactively address potential outcomes before they escalate.
Holistic risk vetting and expert collaboration
Our effectiveness begins with a deeply ingrained proactive mindset. Analysts are trained to look beyond their own specialty, quickly cross-checking risks or referring them to our dedicated SMEs.
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Multi-disciplinary assessment: Even when faced with imminent suicide or self-harm, we simultaneously assess risks across domains such as child safety, violent extremism, and graphic violence. This internal collaboration ensures we never miss potential adjacent or future risks. |
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Comprehensive protection: Our vigilance extends beyond immediate threats. We proactively examine secondary risks, such as harassment or misinformation, ensuring we provide a robust, end-to-end layer of protection for affected individuals and partners at every stage. |
Together, our experts form the backbone of predictive online safety, combining foresight, precision, and speed to prevent harm before it happens.
Real-world example: When proactive thinking saves lives
To illustrate this rapid, multi-disciplinary teamwork, consider a recent time-critical incident our team addressed.
The risk: Imminent self-harm and possible violence
Earlier this year, one of our analysts spotted a post from a teenage user in the U.S., a single but credible and imminent threat to livestream their own suicide at school. Photos indicated the user was on their way to school, which meant time was critical. Within hours, our team traced their location using only those photos, verified details through OSINT, and contacted law enforcement directly.
That collaboration prevented a tragedy. It is a moment we will never forget, and a reminder that foresight is not theoretical. It saves lives.
The details: From one post to saving a life
Through rapid, focused intelligence work and collaboration, our analysts conducted a deep-dive investigation to determine the credibility and imminence of the risk. This turned a single suicide signal — without any indication of location or timing — into actionable intelligence for a real and imminent threat.
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Pinpoint location: Using OSINT and geolocation based solely on the user’s photos, the team narrowed from identifying a city to pinpointing the specific high school the minor attended and was heading toward. |
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Risk verification: We gathered detailed physical descriptors for rapid identification, along with possible escalating factors such as self-diagnosed mental health challenges and substance abuse indicators. We proactively identified potential access to means of harm, clarifying that what was initially feared to be a firearm was a non-lethal gun.Together, our experts form the backbone of predictive online safety, combining foresight, precision, and speed to prevent harm before it happens. |
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Rapid response: Our team immediately contacted local law enforcement, providing vital, detailed, and actionable intelligence based on our findings. This rapid exchange ensured officers could respond safely, precisely, and with maximum speed to intervene and mitigate the immediate risk of suicide. It also reinforced our core commitment to child safety and successful intervention. |
This experience continues to guide how we train our analysts and refine our systems so we can predict and prevent harm even faster.
Developing the next generation of proactive experts
True proactivity is not just about systems, it is about mindset. As leaders, we know the sustained success of these real-time responses depends on our commitment to developing our team’s expertise and leadership. We have transitioned from being hands-on experts to mentors who cultivate future leaders. Predictive technology is only as strong as the proactive mindset of the people who operate it, and Resolver invests heavily in growing those people.
From expert to leader: Renal honed her skills leading a team of analysts focused on imminent threats to life, mastering the rapid mitigation of immediate risks. Irina moved into a leadership role focused on building analysts’ skills in intelligence reporting, quality control, and managing complex risks. This shift was essential. We focused on developing the next generation of experts rather than doing all the analysis ourselves.
Cultivating forward-looking analysts: We place strong emphasis on building a forward-looking mindset because operating under pressure can make teams rely on past facts. We overcome this by maintaining a sharp focus on the “so what” for our clients and by asking “what might this become?” rather than “what has this been?” This proactive approach means Resolver does not just manage risk. We anticipate and mitigate it, protecting platforms and their users before threats fully materialize.
Leading change: Predictive intelligence for industry-wide safety
This multi-layered, expert-driven approach shows how our diverse teams work together to reduce risk seamlessly. Today, Resolver’s combination of predictive tools, human insight, and real-time collaboration sets a new standard for online safety.
We also know the work is never finished. The threat landscape continues to evolve, and staying ahead means constantly rethinking what prediction should look like.
We recognize that the world of Trust and Safety is a fast-paced, challenging environment. To our teams, thank you. Your speed, empathy, and expertise make this mission possible every day.
As we reflect on two decades of protecting children and safeguarding online spaces we’re also looking ahead to the next frontier of Trust & Safety: the proactive, intelligent elimination of CSAM. Resolver’s new Unknown CSAM Detection Service represents the culmination of 20 years of learning, evolving, and purpose. It’s built to identify, prevent, and remove child sexual abuse material at speed and scale, while protecting humans behind the screen.
Learn more about how we’re redefining child safety for the next generation.
More from Trust & Safety’s 20th Anniversary series:
- Two Decades of Protection: Resolver’s Constant Evolution in Online Child Safety
- What We Call Threats: Evolving Taxonomies and the Role of Regulation
- From “Chicken Soup” to Catastrophe: The Dangers of an English-Only Trust & Safety Model
- The Human at the Heart of the Machine: A 20-Year Lesson in Online Safety
