Trust and Safety is the field of professional and academic effort to allow people to positively use technology while being safe from harm. This course explores how online services and AI systems are abused to cause real human harm and the potential social, operational, product, legal and engineering responses. Students will learn about the use of social media by terrorists, online fraud, pig-butchering, misinformation, child exploitation, harassment, self-harm and AI psychosis. This will include studying both the technical and sociological roots of these harms and the ways various companies have responded. The class is taught by a practitioner with a CS background and a professor of communication with a psychology background and supplemented by guest lecturers from tech companies. Students will spend the quarter working in teams to build solutions to real trust and safety challenges, which will include the application of AI technologies to detecting and stopping abuse. For those taking this course for CS credit, the prerequisite is CS 106B or equivalent and this course fulfills the Technology in Society requirement. Content note: This class will cover real-world harmful behavior and expose students to potentially upsetting material. Course website: https://cs152.stanford.edu/
3 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
Trust and Safety is the field of professional and academic effort to allow people to positively use technology while being safe from harm. This course explores how online services and AI systems are abused to cause real human harm and the potential social, operational, product, legal and engineering responses. Students will learn about the use of social media by terrorists, online fraud, pig-butchering, misinformation, child exploitation, harassment, self-harm and AI psychosis. This will include studying both the technical and sociological roots of these harms and the ways various companies have responded. The class is taught by a practitioner with a CS background and a professor of communication with a psychology background and supplemented by guest lecturers from tech companies. Students will spend the quarter working in teams to build solutions to real trust and safety challenges, which will include the application of AI technologies to detecting and stopping abuse. For those taking this course for CS credit, the prerequisite is CS106B or equivalent and this course fulfills the Technology in Society requirement. Content note: This class will cover real-world harmful behavior and expose students to potentially upsetting material. Course website: https://cs152.stanford.edu/
Offered in Spring 2026 at Stanford University.