trust and safety

Kara Swisher interviewed Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, shortly after he left his position at the company. Two things in particular stuck out at me during the interview. Firstly, Roth seemed genuinely interested in presenting the arguments and perspectives of people with whom he disagreed in good faith (chiefly Elon) while Swisher consistently pushed him to admit that the Bad Guys are up to No Good. The second thing was that it seemed like it had never occurred to Roth, until the moment of his resignation, that maybe a social media platform shouldn't have as one of its core obligations to its constituents (namely users and advertisers) a mission to protect marginalized communities from offensive or inciteful content.

I'm fascinated by the worldview of people like Yoel Roth because he shares a view of the world that is both dominant in elite culture and fundamentally different from that of my own. On multiple occasions throughout the interview, Roth admitted that he believes that people can change, and that he is optimistic regarding human nature. This is consistent with what Sowell calls the unconstrained vision - in brief, that humans are perfectible, and that we ought to try to perfect them through enlightened policy enacted by self-appointed enlightened rulers. I happen to think this is a disastrous, utopian myth, and I think we have accumulated enough historical evidence by now to demonstrate it.

Ultimately I think Roth leaving Twitter was an implicit realization that the direction in which Elon wants to take the company makes the idea of having self-appointed content moderators redundant or even anathema to the central mission of the organization.