Yoel RothPreviously, the head of Twitter’s confidence and security, now at Match, shares his concerns about the future of open social fabric and his ability to combat misinformation, spam and other illegal content, such as CSAM sexual abuse. In a recent interview, Roth was worried about the lack of moderation tools available in the Fediverse – the Open Social Web that includes applications such as Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed and others, as well as other open platforms such as Bluesky.
She also recalled the basic moments of confidence and security on Twitter, such as her decision to ban President Trump from the platform, the misinformation spread by Russian Bot Farms and how Twitter users, including CEO Jack Dorsey, fell victim to Bots.
In the podcast Revolution.Social with @rabbleRoth pointed out that efforts to build more democratically online communities throughout the open social fabric are also those that have the least resources when it comes to moderation tools.
“… looking at Mastodon, looking at other services based on ActivityPub [protocol]Looking at Bluesky in his early days and then looking at the yarn, as Meta began to grow, what we saw was that many of the services that lean the toughest of community control gave their communities the least technical tools to manage their policies, “Roth said.
He also saw a “big back” on the open social fabric when he came to the transparency and legality of the decision that the twitter once had. While, undoubtedly, many then disagreed with Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, the company explained its rationale for it. Now, social media providers are so worried about the prevention of bad actors to play that they rarely explain themselves.
Meanwhile, on many open social platforms, users would not receive notice of their prohibited positions and their positions would disappear – there was no indication of the others who had the post.
“I don’t blame the newly formed businesses for the newly established businesses, or new pieces of software that not all the bells and whistles have, but if the whole issue of the project increased the democratic legitimacy of governance and what we have taken is to take a step back to governance, then has it really worked?” Roth wonders.
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The finances of moderation
It also brought about issues around its finances of moderation and how the federal approach was not yet viable on this front.
For example, an organization called IFTAS (Independent Federal Confidence & Security) worked to build moderation tools for Fediverse, including the provision of Fediverse with access to CSAM to combat tools, but ran out of money and money had to close a lot of her works earlier in 2025.
“We saw that it was coming two years ago, Iftas saw it coming, everyone who works in this area is largely voluntarily voluntarily volunteered for efforts and efforts, and that goes so far, because at some point people have families and have to pay bills and calculate the costs of the ML. “It just gets expensive, and the finances of this federal approach to trust and security are never added enough and in my opinion, they still don’t.”
In the meantime, Bluesky has chosen to employ coordinators and hire confidence and security, but is limited to the moderation of her own application. In addition, they provide tools that allow people to adapt their own preferences of moderation.
“They do this work on a scale. There is obviously room for improvement. I would love to see them to be a little more transparent. But, in essence, they do the right things,” Roth said. However, as the service further deceived, Bluesky will address questions about when it is responsible for protecting the person about community needs, he notes.
For example, with Doxxing, it is likely that one will not see that their personal information has spread to the internet because of the way in which moderation tools are shaped. But it should still be someone’s responsibility to impose these protections, even if the user is not in the main Bluesky application.
Where to pull the line to privacy
Another issue facing the Fediverse is that the decision to favor privacy can prevent moderation efforts. While Twitter tried not to store personal data that was not needed, it was still collecting things like the user’s IP address when access to the service, device identifiers and much more. They helped the company when it had to do a forensic analysis of something like a Russian Troll farm.
Fediverse administrators, meanwhile, may not even collect the necessary logs or will not see them if they believe they are a violation of user privacy.
But the reality is that without data, it is harder to determine who is really a bot.
Roth has offered some examples of this from Twitter days, noting how a tendency was made for users to answer “bot” to anyone who disagreed. He says he initially created a notice and reviewed all these positions by hand, examining hundreds of cases of “bot” and no one was ever right. Even the co -founder of Twitter and former CEO Jack Dorsey fell victim, retweeting positions by a Russian actor who claimed to be Crystal JohnsonA black woman from New York.
“The company’s chief executive liked this content, strengthened it and had no way to know as a user that Crystal Johnson was actually a Russian train,” Roth said.
The role of ai
A timely topic of discussion was the way AI changed the landscape. Roth reported the recent Stanford research that found that, in a political context, large linguistic models (LLMS) could be more convincing than humans when tuned properly.
This means that a solution based only on content analysis itself is not enough.
Instead, companies have to monitor other signs of behavior – as if creating an entity multiple accounts, using automation to publish or publish in curious times of the day corresponding to different time zones, he suggested.
“These are signs of behavior that are latent even in truly convincing content and I think you have to start this there,” Roth said. “If you start with the content, you are in an equipment race against AI models and you have already lost.”
