{"id":184205,"date":"2025-07-31T20:24:40","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T20:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/31\/twitters-former-trust-and-safety-head-details-the-challenges-facing-decentralized-social-platforms-techcrunch\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T20:24:40","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T20:24:40","slug":"twitters-former-trust-and-safety-head-details-the-challenges-facing-decentralized-social-platforms-techcrunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/31\/twitters-former-trust-and-safety-head-details-the-challenges-facing-decentralized-social-platforms-techcrunch\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter&#8217;s former Trust and Safety head details the challenges facing decentralized social platforms | TechCrunch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.yoyoel.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Yoel Roth<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2022\/11\/10\/twitter-elon-musk-resignations-yoel-roth-robin-wheeler\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">previously<\/a> the head of Twitter\u2019s Trust and Safety, <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2024\/03\/11\/twitters-former-head-trust-safety-joins-match-group-protect-millions-users-dating-apps\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">now at Match<\/a>, is sharing his concerns about the future of the open social web and its ability to combat misinformation, spam, and other illegal content, like child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In a recent interview, Roth worried about the lack of moderation tools available to the fediverse \u2014 the open social web that includes apps like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, and others, as well as other open platforms like Bluesky.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He also reminisced about key moments in Trust and Safety at Twitter, like its decision to ban President Trump from the platform, the misinformation spread by Russian bot farms, and how Twitter\u2019s own users, including CEO Jack Dorsey, fell prey to bots.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the podcast <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yS_cXVrkyVE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">revolution.social with @Rabble<\/a>, Roth pointed out that the efforts at building more democratically run online communities across the open social web are also those that have the fewest resources when it comes to moderation tools.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201c\u2026looking at Mastodon, looking at other services based on ActivityPub [protocol], looking at Bluesky in its earliest days, and then looking at Threads as Meta started to develop it, what we saw was that a lot of the services that were leaning the hardest into community-based control gave their communities the least technical tools to be able to administer their policies,\u201d Roth said. <\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Yoel Roth on Banning Trump, Battling Bots &amp; the Difficult Job of Trust &amp; Safety\" width=\"696\" height=\"392\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yS_cXVrkyVE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He also saw a \u201cpretty big backslide\u201d on the open social web when it came to the transparency and decision legitimacy that Twitter once had. While, arguably, many at the time disagreed with Twitter\u2019s decision to ban Trump, the company explained its rationale for doing so. Now, social media providers are so concerned about preventing bad actors from gaming them that they rarely explain themselves.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Meanwhile, on many open social platforms, users wouldn\u2019t receive a notice about their banned posts, and their posts would just vanish \u2014 there wasn\u2019t even an indication to others that the post used to exist.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI don\u2019t blame startups for being startups, or new pieces of software for lacking all the bells and whistles, but if the whole point of the project was increasing democratic legitimacy of governance, and what we\u2019ve done is take a step back on governance, then, has this actually worked at all?\u201d Roth wonders.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-techcrunch-inline-cta\">\n<div class=\"inline-cta__wrapper\">\n<p>Techcrunch event<\/p>\n<div class=\"inline-cta__content\">\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-cta__location\">San Francisco<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-cta__separator\">|<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-cta__date\">October 27-29, 2025<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-economics-of-moderation\">The economics of moderation<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He also brought up the issues around the economics of moderation and how the federated approach hasn\u2019t yet been sustainable on this front. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For instance, an organization called IFTAS (Independent Federated Trust &amp; Safety) had been working to build moderation tools for the fediverse, including providing the fediverse with access to tools to combat CSAM, but it ran out of money and <a href=\"https:\/\/about.iftas.org\/2025\/03\/03\/iftas-service-shutdowns\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">had to shut down many<\/a> of its projects earlier in 2025.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWe saw it coming two years ago. IFTAS saw it coming. Everybody who\u2019s been working in this space is largely volunteering their time and efforts, and that only goes so far, because at some point, people have families and need to pay bills, and compute costs stack up if you need to run ML models to detect certain types of bad content,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt just all gets expensive, and the economics of this federated approach to trust and safety never quite added up. And in my opinion, still don\u2019t.\u201d <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Bluesky, meanwhile, has chosen to employ moderators and hire in trust and safety, but it limits itself to the moderation of its own app. Plus, they\u2019re providing tools that let people customize their own moderation preferences. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThey\u2019re doing this work at scale. There\u2019s obviously room for improvement. I\u2019d love to see them be a bit more transparent. But, fundamentally, they\u2019re doing the right stuff,\u201d Roth said. However, as the service further decentralizes, Bluesky will face questions about when it is the responsibility to protect the individual over the needs of the community, he notes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For example, with doxxing, it\u2019s possible that someone wouldn\u2019t see that their personal information was being spread online because of how they configured their moderation tools. But it should still be someone\u2019s responsibility to enforce those protections, even if the user isn\u2019t on the main Bluesky app. <\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-where-to-draw-the-line-on-privacy\">Where to draw the line on privacy<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another issue facing the fediverse is that the decision to favor privacy can thwart moderation attempts. While Twitter tried not to store personal data it didn\u2019t need to, it still collected things like the IP address of the user, when they accessed the service, device identifiers, and more. These helped the company when it needed to do forensic analysis of something like a Russian troll farm.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fediverse admins, meanwhile, may not even be collecting the necessary logs or won\u2019t view them if they think it\u2019s a violation of user privacy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the reality is that without data, it\u2019s harder to determine who\u2019s really a bot.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Roth offered a few examples of this from his Twitter days, noting how it became a trend for users to reply \u201cbot\u201d to anyone they disagreed with. He says that he initially set up an alert and reviewed all these posts manually, examining hundreds of instances of \u201cbot\u201d accusations, and nobody was ever right. Even Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey fell victim, retweeting posts <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.x.com\/common-thread\/en\/topics\/stories\/2021\/four-truths-about-bots\" target=\"_blank\">from a Russian actor who claimed to be Crystal Johnson<\/a>, a Black woman from New York.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe CEO of the company liked this content, amplified it, and had no way of knowing as a user that Crystal Johnson was actually a Russian troll,\u201d Roth said. <\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-role-of-ai\">The role of AI<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One timely topic of discussion was how AI was changing the landscape. Roth referenced recent research from Stanford that found that, in a political context, large language models (LLMs) could even be more convincing than humans when properly tuned. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That means a solution that relies only on content analysis itself isn\u2019t enough. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Instead, companies need to track other behavioral signals \u2014 like if some entity is creating multiple accounts, using automation to post, or posting at weird times of day that correspond to different time zones, he suggested.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThese are behavioral signals that are latent even in really convincing content. And I think that\u2019s where you have to start this,\u201d Roth said. \u201cIf you\u2019re starting with the content, you\u2019re in an arms race against leading AI models and you\u2019ve already lost.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/07\/31\/twitters-former-trust-safety-head-details-the-challenges-facing-decentralized-social-platforms\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yoel Roth, previously the head of Twitter\u2019s Trust and Safety, now at Match, is sharing his concerns about the future of the open social web and its ability to combat misinformation, spam, and other illegal content, like child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In a recent interview, Roth worried about the lack of moderation tools available [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":184207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-184205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}