Yoel Roth, previously the head of Twitter’s 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 to the fediverse — the open social web that includes apps like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, and others, as well as other open platforms like Bluesky.
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’s own users, including CEO Jack Dorsey, fell prey to bots.
On the podcast revolution.social with @Rabble, 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.
“…looking 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,” Roth said.
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He also saw a “pretty big backslide” 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’s 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.
Meanwhile, on many open social platforms, users wouldn’t receive a notice about their banned posts, and their posts would just vanish — there wasn’t even an indication to others that the post used to exist.
“I don’t 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 legitimac …