Former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief: ‘If Protected Tweets Stop Working, Run’

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, avoided what he thought was his immediate worst-case scenario of getting fired the day Elon Musk took over the social-media company. And then things got worse anyway. 

Roth shared his perspective on the company’s chaotic path in his first in-depth public interview since resigning from Twitter on Nov. 10(Opens in a new window), a panel Tuesday at the Knight Foundation’s Informed conference(Opens in a new window) in Coral Gables, Fla. 

His interviewer, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, started off by asking Roth why he didn’t beat Musk to the punch by bailing out himself. 

Saying “think about the experience of being a frog in a pot of boiling water,” Roth said he first set out to avoid becoming that unaware amphibian and then offered advice to other people who might be in a similar situation. “Write down what your limits are,” he said. “Write down how you will know if you are being boiled alive.” 

Musk did not cross Roth’s first line–asking him to lie–and even sounded genuinely interested in creating a new content-moderation council. But after Twitter had survived the runoff election in Brazil and midterm elections in the US, and it was clear that Musk was going to sweep away his team’s work, Roth felt like it was time to go.

“We had a system of governance; it was rules-based, we enforced our rules as written,” Roth said of the old regime. “When that system of government went away, you don’t need a head of trust and safety anymore.” 

(Later on in the panel, Roth allowed that Twitter blocking the sharing of a New York Post story about emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was a mistake driven by anxiety over how social platforms became useful idiots for Russian “hack and leak” influence operations before the 2016 election.)  

Musk has since reversed the suspensions of many people banned from Twitter for repeated violations of those rules (most infamously former president Donald Trump), stopped enforcing such rules as its ban on Covid-19 misinformation, botched a rollout of a new paid-verification system (which Roth said “got through over written advice prepared by my team and others at Twitter”), and gutted the Twitter workforce in a series of mass firings. 

Roth did not pronounce Twitter doomed, saying Musk is “not the unequivocal villain of the story,” but he warned that a brittle content-moderation system will break before the inventive villainy of bad actors online.

“There is no set it and forget it,” he said. After Swisher asked if Musk’s new approach to content moderation amounted to “fuck it,” Roth said to forget that too. 

“Even if you wanted a policy that is fuck it, you can’t,” he said. “You simply cannot do that if you are operating what you want to be a commercially viable consumer service.” 

But while Twitter may become a more toxic place, Roth said he expected it to remain resilient as an online platform. “There are going to be challenges, but I don’t think it’s going to fall over,” he said. Instead, he advised watching for “the canaries in the coal mine that suggest things are not right.”

“Does block still work?” he asked as one example of a Twitter mechanism that might seize up. “If protected tweets stop working, run.” 

In his most public commentary about his former employer prior to Tuesday’s panel–a New York Times op-ed two weeks ago(Opens in a new window)–Roth suggested that Apple and Google could force a course correction at Twitter by enforcing their app-store rules requiring content moderation. On Tuesday, though, Roth discounted that possibility. 

“It would require something really dramatic to happen for Apple to remove Twitter from the App Store,” he said, adding that “We should be really worried about app store governance.” 

Swisher closed her questioning of Roth by asking him “Are you hopeful for Twitter?” 

Roth’s answer: “I’m hopeful for the internet.”