Revolution.Social

Yoel Roth on Banning Trump, Battling Bots & the Difficult Job of Trust & Safety

Revolution.Social

Show Notes

"Content moderation decisions are like assholes," says Yoel Roth, the former head of trust & safety for Twitter. "Everybody's got one."

The underrated challenge of working in trust and safety is that every decision could affect millions of users, and the reasons for those decisions are often opaque. Today on Revolution.Social, Yoel and Rabble talk about what goes on behind the scenes when a platform like Twitter wants to do something like ban President Donald Trump; how moderation best practices can work on decentralized protocols; and the fallout of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.

" The most striking thing to me from a lot of that work was how a lot of the Russian accounts that we identified on Twitter weren't posting lies."

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

03:42 Yoel's Origin Story

06:25 How Content Moderation Starts

08:56 Banning Trump

11:22 The Future of Social Media Protocols

16:12 Trust and Safety on Decentralized Platforms

21:12 Inauthentic Activity and Bots

28:22 The Arms Race Against LLMs

29:47 Community Self-Governance

38:28 No, You Need Moderation

42:09 The Homogeneity of Tech Founders

46:20 Should Twitter Promote Democracy?

48:59 Why Spam Really, Really Matters

51:31 Who Else Should Be on the Podcast?

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This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.

To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/

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