Yoel Roth on hard tradeoffs, speaking publicly and the future of trust and safety

Turns out I’m in the minority for last week’s fun tradeoff - 72% of you said you would choose the beach over going to the lake.

This week’s question is, would you order pancakes or waffles?

This week, I’m joined by two fabulous guests - Josh Lawson and Yoel Roth.

Josh was a colleague of mine at Facebook and is now doing work with the Aspen Institute on AI, elections, and trust. He’s my guest host this week, and we open the show looking at the Supreme Court deciding to take up the Texas and Florida content moderation bills, how people should judge if platforms are doing enough on elections, and his work as Aspen.

I then chatted with Yoel Roth - the former head of trust and safety at Twitter. Yoel has faced terrible harassment from former President Trump and Elon Musk, including this week when Musk said Roth and Kara Swisher - who interviewed Yoel last week at Code - are “the purest form of evil.”

We talk about why he continues to speak out in the face of this type of harassment, how trust and safety people can protect themselves, some of the toughest decisions he made at the company, and how we can restore trust in the content moderation process.

Here are some of the pieces we mention:

Yoel’s Pieces

• Lawfare: Content Moderation’s Legalism Problem 

• New York Times: Trump Attacked Me. Then Musk Did. It Wasn't an Accident. 

• New York Times: I Was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. This Is What Could Become of It.

Kate Klonick: The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech

Resources for protecting yourself online

• DeleteMe

• Reputation Defender

• TallPoppy

• PrivacyParty

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