Our Team
Staff
Charlotte Willner
Executive Director
Charlotte Willner joined TSF after 15 years of working in online trust and safety. She began her career at Facebook, where she led international user support, then built out their first safety operations team. She went on to build and lead Pinterest’s trust and safety operations team, overseeing online safety, law enforcement response, and intellectual property matters. She holds a degree in English from Bowdoin College and is delighted to show you that this is, in fact, what you can do with an English degree.
Kaofeng Lee
Director of Organizational Development
Kaofeng Lee joined TSF after 14 years of working as an advocate, educator, and community builder in the field of gender-based violence and technology. She was previously at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (U.S.) and the Women’s Services Network (Australia) where she advocated with community organizations, policymakers, and technology companies for better policies and practices on gender and technology. Kaofeng is passionate about connecting communities, empowering people, and working together to create a safer and just world.
Amanda Menking
Director of Programs
Amanda Menking joined TSF after spending a decade in academia, researching bias, knowledge production, and safety in online communities and teaching courses about design, research, and human-computer interaction. She’s also a veteran of the Seattle tech scene, having worked for two start-ups and as a vendor at Microsoft prior to pursuing her Ph.D. in Information Science. Amanda is most interested in doing meaningful work with thoughtful, kind people with the aim of building more just and equitable worlds.
Board
Adelin Cai
Co-Founder & Board Member
Adelin Cai has spent the last decade working with and leading teams responsible for product policies and their enforcement. As Pinterest’s former Head of Policy, she led the team that developed the company’s principles and core values around content moderation, covering a range of issues from hateful speech to medical (mis)information to dank memes. Prior to Pinterest, she ran Twitter’s Legal Ads Policy team, guiding policy and operations for Twitter’s self-serve and international advertising products.
Clara Tsao
Co-Founder & Board Chair
Clara Tsao was a 2019 Mozilla Fellow examining the impact of policies related to content moderation, online disinformation, and terrorist content. Clara previously served as the Senior Advisor for Emerging Technology at the Department of Homeland Security and as Chief Technology Officer of US Government’s interagency Countering Violent Extremism and Countering Foreign Influence Task Force. Prior to government, Clara worked in Microsoft’s public sector team focused on digital literacy and worldwide education. Clara is a non-resident fellow focused on disinformation at German Marshall Fund and Atlantic Council, and a senior advisor for the UN-backed initiative, Tech Against Terrorism.
Tim Lordan
Board Member
Tim Lordan is the Executive Director for the Internet Education Foundation (IEF), a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to educating the public and policy makers about the potential of a decentralized global Internet to promote democracy, communications, and commerce.
Mr. Lordan is an attorney admitted to the Massachusetts State Bar and is a graduate of Suffolk University Law School.
Eric Goldman
Co-Founder & Board Member
Eric Goldman is a Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. He has been writing about and teaching Internet law for a quarter-century. Before entering academia full-time, Goldman was General Counsel at consumer review site Epinions.com. He founded the Content Moderation at Scale conference series, which brought together hundreds of trust and safety professionals in 2018 and 2019.
Advisors
Amar Ashar
Amar Ashar is a senior researcher and Head of Algorithmic Policy at Spotify. His work focuses on algorithmic impact & responsibility, where he collaborates with product teams using AI/ML and generative AI technologies. He is also an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center, where he was previously Assistant Research Director and led projects focused on the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence, harmful speech online, and global governance and policy.
Tarleton Gillespie
Tarleton Gillespie is a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and an affiliated associate professor in the Department of Communication and Department of Information Science at Cornell University. He is the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT, 2007) , co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (MIT, 2014), and author of Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media (Yale, 2018).
Janet Haven
Janet Haven is the executive director of Data & Society. She has worked at the intersection of technology policy, governance, and accountability for more than twenty years, both domestically and internationally. Janet is a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises President Biden and the National AI Initiative Office on a range of issues related to artificial intelligence. She also acts as an advisor to the Trust and Safety Foundation, and has brought her expertise in non-profit governance to bear through varied board memberships. She writes and speaks regularly on matters related to technology and society, federal AI research and development, and AI governance and policy.
Before joining D&S, Janet spent more than a decade at the Open Society Foundations. There, she oversaw funding strategies and worldwide grant-making related to technology, human rights, and governance, and played a substantial role in shaping the emerging international field focused on technology and accountability.
Janet began her career in technology start-ups in Central Europe and lived in the region for more than fifteen years. She holds an MA from the University of Virginia and a BA from Amherst College.