Yoel Roth

@yoyoel.com

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Internet sanitation enthusiast and full-time corgi wrangler.

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Say it louder for the folks in the back: Jawboning is a real problem that deserves real jurisprudence, but this case was always built on lies, misrepresentation, and conjecture. Glad to see the majority recognize that.

Barrett: Plaintiffs claims are "no more than conjecture" and "have not pointed to *any* past restrictions likely traceable to government defendants" -- and Fifth Circuit wrongly relied on District Court's "clearly erroneous" findings of fact.

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IT IS THAT TIME OF THE WEEK. New Ctrl-Alt-Speech is out. We have guest host @yoyoel.com telling us "the least erotic way to talk about porn" among some fun stories about social media sides including ExTwitter, Facebook, Temu (is that social media?!?) & more podcast.ctrlaltspeech.com/2315966/1521...

The Internet is (Still) for Porn, with Yoel Roth - Ctrl-Alt-Speechpodcast.ctrlaltspeech.com In this week's round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by guest host Yoel Roth, former head of trust & safety at Twitter and now head o...

Sounds right to me www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

In retrospect, it’s really my fault for starting a great book right when I need to be grading my students’ final papers…

Just came back to my hotel room to find that someone left me complimentary reading material, and honestly, I’m not mad at the selection.

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📣 Some personal news: one month from today, my book is out! 🎉 I wrote the 📖 during a wild year as Jim Jordan subpoenaed & Stephen Miller sued me & my colleagues. Now it’s my turn to tell the story. Preorders are open —they really help! If you hate AMZN, small shops on my website. amzn.to/4bbiDJD

Amazon.com: Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality: 9781541703377: DiResta, Renee: Booksamzn.to Amazon.com: Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality: 9781541703377: DiResta, Renee: Books

I don’t read a lot of books with ERM as a main character, for, uh, obvious reasons, but when I tell you I could not put this book down for the last day and read it in more or less 2 sittings — take that as the endorsement it is.

Things are deeply weird in Teslaland right now, so while we wait to get some clarity might I gently recommend my book "Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors" as a guide to the deep roots of this weirdness? Available here, or anywhere good books are sold: benbellabooks.com/shop/ludicro...

Ludicrous - BenBella Booksbenbellabooks.com Ludicrous lays bare the disconnect between the popular perception of Tesla and the day-to-day realities of the company.

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Lawmakers must "seek the declassification and urgent publication of as much of the intelligence related to TikTok ... as possible. The public deserves more than hypotheticals, and eventually, a court will demand the specifics" www.techpolicy.press/the-us-gover... @justinhendrix.bsky.social

The US Government Must Show Its Cards on TikTok | TechPolicy.Presswww.techpolicy.press Before passing legislation that could result in the ban of the app, the government should declassify intelligence about the threat, say Justin Hendrix and Ben Lennett.

I’m in Australia for meetings and was telling someone how cute I find the kangaroo and emu in the Australian coat of arms. Without missing a beat, the guy I was talking to said, “Lots of countries have animals in their coats of arms, but Aussies are the only ones who eat the animals in ours.”

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SIO's report on the NCMEC CyberTipline pipeline is out today, the result of almost a year of work. There are a lot of findings for improving the ecosystem from platforms to NCMEC to government to law enforcement.

How to Fix the Online Child Exploitation Reporting Systemcyber.fsi.stanford.edu A new Stanford Internet Observatory report examines how to improve the CyberTipline pipeline from dozens of interviews with tech companies, law enforcement and the nonprofit that runs the U.S. online ...

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Late last year, after my legal threats quieted down, I started to get very frustrated with the lack of coordinated response to the war on truth and the intimidation of those who defend it. This is my answer. www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/b...

New Group Joins the Political Fight Over Disinformation Onlinewww.nytimes.com The group intends to fight what its leader, Nina Jankowicz, and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and their allies to undermine researchers who study disinformation.

In my head, I once saw a cartoon that goes something like: - Person is raging about something inconsequential - Angel appears out of parted clouds and deposits into the raging person’s hands a reaction to the raging that just says, like, “ok cool” Did I hallucinate this meme? Internet, help me!

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Offering a sort of gift: If you manage someone in Ethical/Responsible AI, please give them license for regular mental health days off. To step away from a headspace that often requires saturating in the darker side of things. I'll explain some of why. 🧵

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Finally getting around to publishing my latest class syllabus! It's been a while since I taught my basic Internet speech platform regulation class. Here is the 2024 version. 1/ docs.google.com/document/d/1...

2024 Platform Regulation Syllabusdocs.google.com

How the email found me

Maybe I completely missed this when it happened, but was there ever any coverage of the fact that Wikileaks now quietly throw a 500 error when you try to access the 2016 DNC hack-and-leak? Literally nothing else on the Wikileaks site errors out in this way.

How the email found me

This is a really good conversation between Nilay Patel and Cloudflare's CEO. www.theverge.com/24121399/clo... I especially like this bit re: content moderation's usual failure conditions — which have little to do with moderation, and everything to do with a lack of institutional trust.

Not gonna lie, @shteyngart.bsky.social’s piece in The Atlantic about going on a cruise is every single thing I hoped it would be.

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Everwww.theatlantic.com Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

Saw my first Vision Pro in the wild, and — sharing this purely observationally, not judgmentally — the dude wearing it on my flight was actively and intensely (i.e. finger in nostril past the first knuckle) picking his nose.

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It is deeply frustrating to watch Haidt cherrypick and twist research that I spent half my career in the thick of. I’m so grateful for Candice Odgers’ willingness to challenge him. He’s leading the public down the wrong path by playing into parents’ anxieties. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

When Google Reader died, I switched to Feedbin (feedbin.com - could not recommend more enthusiastically) and the Reeder app on iOS and Mac, and the overwhelming majority of my news and content diet remains RSS-based. I’m so glad to see someone crack the paid-RSS issue.

Subscriber RSS feeds for news sites should be a thing, but they haven’t been. @404media.co is working on it, and their work should benefit other Ghost sites. Such a cool solution. (A shoutout to FeedPress which has long made me stop missing FeedBurner.) www.404media.co/404-media-no...

404 Media Now Has a Full Text RSS Feedwww.404media.co We paid for the development of full text RSS feeds for Ghost-based publishers. Now we can offer them to our paid subscribers, and other Ghost sites can use the service too.

I had to deliver a “don’t be on your cell phones when your classmates are presenting” admonishment to my class today, and I have been wracked with guilt over scolding them ever since.

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Exclusive: Twitter’s former head of trust and safety @yoyoel.com heads to Match Group to try to clean up the company’s giant portfolio of dating apps. Read our conversation here www.wired.com/story/yoel-r...

Twitter’s Former Trust and Safety Chief Is Trying to Clean Up Your Dating Appswww.wired.com Yoel Roth suffered targeted harassment after quitting as top content cop at Elon Musk’s Twitter. Now he’s head of trust and safety at dating giant Match Group, owner of Tinder, Hinge, and more.

In retrospect, planning to spend a flight preparing my slides and lecture notes for a class session on sex and content moderation was perhaps not the best idea.

New paper from me and @samlai.bsky.social out today in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, looking at the moderation capabilities of federated and decentralized social media, and what needs to happen to make these platforms resilient to online harms. doi.org/10.54501/jot...

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🌟 Hear from authors published in the latest issue of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety today (leap day!) at 9am PT. Register for the fast-paced webinar here: stanford.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Thrilled for @arodericks.bsky.social and the Bluesky team. Aaron was one of the first folks I hired when I was building Twitter’s integrity org back in 2017, and he‘s an absolute pro. Glad to have him bringing that experience here.

Today, we’re excited to announce Bluesky’s Head of Trust and Safety. Aaron Rodericks, who has over a decade of experience in defending platforms at global scale, is leading our moderation team in cultivating a healthy space for public conversation on Bluesky. Learn more:

Bluesky announces Aaron Rodericks as Head of Trust and Safetywww.prweb.com /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Bluesky, the open social network, has appointed Aaron Rodericks as its new Head of Trust and Safety. Rodericks brings over a decade of...

This is (in my opinion) one of the most important pieces of empirical research to come out about generative AI’s actual/likely effects on politics. @shelbygrossman.bsky.social and team are right to warn that AI built to parrot back our beliefs to us can be an effective vehicle for propaganda.

A new study out of Georgetown and Stanford found that propaganda generated by GPT-3 (not 4!) was persuasive to almost half of the people who read it. I spoke to one of the authors and wrote about the implications www.platformer.news/ai-generated...

Happy open-signups day! For new folks interested in learning more about moderation and safety on Bluesky, here’s a conversation I had a little while back with @jay.bsky.team and @mmasnick.bsky.social exploring those issues in depth:

This convo was the perfect blend of 97% substance and 3% shade. No notes. @jay.bsky.team @yoyoel.com @mmasnick.bsky.social

PROTOCOLS, NOT PLATFORMS: THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF FEDERATED SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKSvimeo.com This is "PROTOCOLS, NOT PLATFORMS: THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF FEDERATED SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS" by Knight Foundation on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos…