Beyond the Feed: Moderating Safe Digital Havens for Young People
A glimpse into the All Things In Moderation panel, Beyond the Feed: Moderating Safe Digital Havens for Young People, featuring Quiip’s own Dan de Sousa alongside three other industry experts. Discover how these community stewards build safe digital havens and supportive third spaces for young people.
What does it take to build truly safe and supportive online spaces for young people today — not just free from harm, but built for belonging?
This was one of the questions explored at All Things In Moderation 2025, a dynamic event dedicated to the field of community management and moderation. As proud sponsors of the conference, Quiip was thrilled to support a line-up of thought-provoking panels, practical insights and expert voices shaping the future of digital communities.
The panel Beyond the Feed: Moderating Safe Digital Havens for Young People brought together four industry experts working at the intersection of youth, health and online safety to delve into what it takes to support young people online. The panel explored what safety means in practice, how to design safe digital spaces, and the importance of community culture.
Alongside Quiip Senior Community Manager and Team Lead, Dan de Sousa, the panel featured:
- Todd Nilson – Community Strategist & Community Builder at Clocktower Advisors
- Lori Fahey – Team Lead at Livewire, creating places for chronically ill young people to connect and play
- Megan Jacobs – digital health innovator helping young people quit vaping and smoking at Truth Initiative.
What does safety mean in practice?
The panel focused on emotional safety, with Megan, Lori, and Dan describing their roles as emotional stewards; there to help young people manage mental health challenges, learn and grow their social skills, and find belonging within online communities. The speakers emphasised the importance of creating safety and supporting adolescents who may have mental health challenges, without making other community members feel unsafe or distressed.
While emotional safety is a vital part of the picture, addressing broader threats to the safety of young people online, such as grooming, bullying, and exposure to harmful or age-inappropriate content is also critical. For moderators, this means being able to identify and escalate risks, but also prioritising safety through intentional design and policy.
What does safety by design look like?
Being intentional with the way a community is designed can create long-lasting success. This can look like choosing values-led language such as “we encourage kind curiosity”, instead of rule-heavy guidelines that focus on what shouldn’t be done. Considering language choice from the beginning can set the right tone and help to model the behaviour you’re wanting to see enacted by your community.
The panel also highlighted the use of visual markers — from rainbow flag banners to pronoun badges – to signal inclusion and safety and encourage expression.
Quiip strongly advocates for safety by design, not just in tone and branding but in structure and processes. Regular, frequent modeation checks, use of profanity and other language filters, and automated alerts for flagged topics or terms can make a big difference in proactive harm reduction.
What makes good moderation in spaces for young people?
Dan de Sousa believes good moderation involves emotional stewardship, which focuses on being able to address emotional distress or help people who are struggling within the community.
As a moderator, Dan underlined that your job is not only to be on the frontlines and ensure that toxic behavior, trolling, misinformation and bad faith actors are removed. Dan also described moderators as “curators of culture” – with a responsibility to create and guide the community in how to behave, and to offer support. Through focusing on cultivating culture, you’re able to create a self-sustaining community that begins to moderate itself.
For communities with young people, good moderation also extends to having a robust framework for identifying and managing risks to the safety of community members and for navigating instances of distress and harm.
How do you create a good community culture?
Lori Fahey places a big emphasis on building community culture including community chat events, where members can interact, provide feedback, and be part of the rule-building process. This participatory approach gives young people a sense of belonging within their community.
Dan echoed this, emphasising the importance of leading by example and that “modelling behaviour is the best policy to create the desired culture”. When members see and understand the behaviour that’s expected, accepted, and celebrated, they tend to follow suit and engage appropriately. They’ll start to feel like it’s their community and reinforce that culture themselves.
Creating a positive community culture doesn’t happen by accident, it requires consistency, intention, and ongoing care. At Quiip we have found that young users respond best to paces that feel authentic, transparent and responsive, rather than top-down or policed. Involving community members in creating culture builds trust and makes moderation more effective over time.
Thoughts on community cut-off ages?
The panelists explored how communities with a broad age range can navigate safety and inclusivity. Megan Jacobs shared that in her community for quitting vaping and smoking, older users sometimes take on a mentoring role, which can be valuable for young members who lack support offline. Megan focuses on ensuring that each user can access the capabilities of the platform equally, which helps to protect younger users from having their age be made apparent due to limitations or restrictions.
At the same time, mixed-age spaces require stronger safeguards in order to provide a safe environment for younger users. Strict community guidelines, content filtering, limited private messaging, and ongoing monitoring are all important to have in place. Regardless of the model, protecting young users requires a clear understanding of their needs, their vulnerabilities, and the power dynamics at play.
Dan and Lori both emphasised the importance of dedicated third spaces for young people – online communities that exist outside of the home or school, where young people can form friendships and express themselves more freely in a safe and age-appropriate environment. They shared how much they’ve each learned from young people by moderating these third spaces, from empathy and boundaries, to the nuances of digital safety and behaviour.
What is one practice you would recommend to others who are stewarding safe places for young people?
“Be eternally curious and authentic. You’re always learning…. and take feedback from newest members. We’ll always find a new way of challenging what’s existing.”
– Dan de Sousa
“The more you can include young people in creating, defining those values, and having them put things in their own words, the better off you’ll be.”
– Megan Jacobs
“Listening is the number one big thing: really taking in what they’re saying. And remembering all behaviour is communication in one way or another.”
– Lori Fahey
Additional resources
For more information on future events, join the Australian Community Managers Facebook group.
For further information on online spaces for young people and the power of communities, see:
- It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by Danah Boyd
- People Powered by Jono Bacon.
