Moderation at scale
The human and operational reality behind queues, policy, judgement and team resilience.
Talks · panels · candid discussions
I speak from lived experience: building LiveLeak, leading through moderation pressure, facing public scrutiny and carrying that perspective into the systems we build now.
Invite Hayden to speak
The human and operational reality behind queues, policy, judgement and team resilience.
What user behaviour, public attention and edge cases reveal about the systems we thought we built.
Founders, narrative, responsibility and what happens when an online product becomes part of culture.
Co-founder of LiveLeak. Creative Director. Systems designer. Filmmaker.
My work sits at the intersection of platforms, people, pressure, and perception.
I don’t give generic industry talks or abstract future-of-technology keynotes. My work is grounded in lived operational experience inside systems where scale changes behaviour, moderation becomes real-time decision-making under pressure, design and reality diverge quickly, and public perception becomes part of the system itself.
Freedom of speech is often discussed as a principle. Running a platform forces you to deal with it as a system.
Where do you draw lines?
What happens when scale, culture, and law collide?
What does “free expression” actually look like when millions of users are involved?
This talk explores the gap between theory and implementation, and the consequences of getting it wrong.
What actually happens when systems designed in theory meet real human behaviour at scale. Lessons drawn from 15 years operating inside large-scale content environments, including LiveLeak.
How moderation systems really function when volume, edge cases, and human judgement collide. What breaks, what survives, and why most systems underestimate people.
How platforms shape narrative, trust, and visibility, often unintentionally. Drawing from direct experience in media scrutiny, public discourse, and institutional discussion.
Why systems don’t fail technically first, they fail behaviourally. How people actually interact with structure, rules, and constraints under scale.
My work has been invited into a range of contexts, including:
I speak at conferences, cultural institutions, policy and academic events, leadership and private executive sessions, and selected industry panels and technical discussions. I’m selective – the conversation needs to be grounded in real operational experience, not surface-level trend discussion. I am open to panels and discussions on freedom of speech/expression and related topics.
My talks are grounded in lived system-level experience, direct about what works and what fails in practice, focused on behaviour rather than theory, and honest about complexity rather than simplifying it away.
If you’re organising an event, panel, or discussion, please include:
→ Invite me to speak
I don’t treat speaking as a separate career. It is a continuation of the same work: understanding how systems behave when they leave the drawing board and enter the real world.
Share the audience, format, topic, location and date. Talks, panels, fireside conversations and selected private sessions are all considered.
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