In April 2023, Annenberg alumnus Yoel Roth sat down with Annenberg PhD candidate Muira McCammon to discuss his experiences as Twitter’s former head of trust & safety (T&S). Out of that conversation came this infographic—a resource aimed at better contextualizing the definitions, policies, and tensions that accompany how people navigate platforms and attempt to make sense of social life online.
Written by Steering Committee Member Muira McCammon, infographic created by Joanna Birkner, Center for Media at Risk Programming Coordinator.
Resources for More Information
Book recommendations
- Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
- Pham, M. H. T. (2022). Why we can’t have nice things: Social media’s influence on fashion, ethics, and property. Duke University Press.
- Tarnoff, B. (2022). Internet for the people: The fight for our digital future. Verso Books.
- Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.
Online resources and articles
- Gillespie, T. (2023). The fact of content moderation; Or, let’s not solve the platforms’ problems for them. Media and Communication, 11(2).
- Shi, K. (2016). “What the heck is Trust & Safety?” LinkedIn Blog post. Retrieved from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-heck-trust-safety-kenny-shi
- Trust & Safety Professional Association’s Glossary: https://www.tspa.org/curriculum/ts-curriculum/glossary/
Yoel Roth is a Tech Policy Fellow at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy and the former Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter. For more than 7 years, he led the teams responsible for Twitter’s content moderation, integrity, and platform security efforts, including policy development, threat investigation, product, design, research, and operations. His current research and writing focus on the trust and safety industry and how technology companies manage the conflicting values and incentives built into content moderation at scale. Before joining Twitter, Yoel received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching examined the technical, policy, business, and cultural dynamics of social networking and dating apps at the dawn of the “App Store” age — studying how policy, governance, and code influence the types of communities that are able to safely and securely form online.
