Social Audio App Wisdom Joins Tech Leaders Working Together To Create a Safer Online Space

Social audio platform Wisdom has joined forces with fellow global tech leaders to become a member of the Oasis Consortium – a first-of-its-kind think-tank dedicated to making the internet safer and more inclusive for all.

The Oasis Consortium is dedicated to advancing digital sustainability through ethical standards and technologies. It brings together global thought leaders and practitioners representing every facet of the internet – from technologists to platforms and advertisers across social networks, online gaming, dating sites and more. The Oasis Consortium is on a mission to build trust as we step into a Web3.0 world and it’s dedicated to accelerating the development of an ethical internet for the benefit of everyone.

The organisation is behind the Digital Sustainability Seals, a signifier of businesses that operate ethically in the digital world, and it powers the Brand Safety Exchange podcast, which is a destination for digital user safety thought leaders. At the start of January, the group published the Oasis Consortium’s User Safety Standards – a first-of-its-kind set of operating principles for businesses and leaders of this new digital age to follow.

Wisdom has committed to following these safety standards and it sits alongside other tech leaders – all dedicated to building a safer, more inclusive Metaverse and Web 3.0. Wisdom also joins the consortium’s founding members in this mission. This move aligns with the UK Government’s proposed Online Safety Bill that is being debated in Parliament which seeks to regulate social media and tech giants and tackle harmful content online.

By pledging its support for the User Safety Standards, Wisdom is now committed to following the framework’s 5Ps. These are: 

• Priority: establish that Trust & Safety is mission-critical to your company including accountable leadership, resources for development, and cross-functional collaboration
• People: develop policies based on representation, learning, and wellness including diversity & inclusion, employee wellness, and becoming a learning organisation
• Partnership: gain expertise, objectivity, and prevention of real-world impacts by utilizing industry alliances, an advisory board, and law enforcement to name a few
• Product: deploy up-to-date technology that enables your success with community guidelines, data for visibility, proactive detection, moderation tools, and user reporting tools
• Process: define comprehensive processes for an effective operation that should include consistent enforcement, effectiveness audit, bias prevention, and transparency reports among others

Wisdom’s Dedication to Online Inclusivity

Unlike other social audio applications, like Clubhouse, Wisdom is designed from the ground up to connect knowledge-seekers to mentors; to bring a level of intimacy and interaction not seen in this way before.

Members can chat live with experts about dozens of topics – from parenting, fitness, and dating to startups, mental health, and beauty, ask the mentors questions and the mentor can choose who they call up as guests, providing an opportunity for a one-to-one connection.

Founded by Dayo Akinrinade, a Black female founder passionate about democratising access to mentorship and improving digital opportunities for all, Wisdom replaces the inequity of closed networks and “warm intros”  with an open, diverse community centred on knowledge-sharing.

Inspired by TikTok, Wisdom utilises an algorithm-friendly design powered by a deep-learning neural network where the algorithms continually gather data including how a user interacts and reacts to a talk. Audio and text transformer models then extract the topics being discussed and the sentiment.

From the onset, Wisdom was built with a  safety by design approach. Signup requires a connection to an existing identity service such as Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The platform uses human moderators who monitor the talks who oversee the platform 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and users can report content that does not comply with the code of conduct. They also use  bad actor detection technology which bans users who exhibit bad behaviour.

Since its launch in October, Wisdom mentors have shared 600,000 minutes of insights and guidance, while listeners have absorbed more than 3 million minutes worth of knowledge.

Founder and CEO of Wisdom Dayo Akinrinade said:

“The Oasis Consortium are working on the front line of social audio moderation. As we navigate the complexity of moderating effectively in a real-time environment, nothing is more important than the safety of the Wisdom community. As platforms, we have a duty of care for our users – by signing up to these Standards and sharing best practice across the group we will take steps to make the internet a safer place.”

President and Co-founder of Oasis Consortium Tiffany Xingyu Wang stated: 

“Oasis User Safety Standards provide a roadmap for emerging platforms to build out trust and safety teams, programs, and tech stack. With more and more innovators like Wisdom signing up to the Standards, we can build digital sustainability into Web3.0 from the get-go.”