phd thesis yoel roth

Alum Yoel Roth (Ph.D. ‘16) to Study Trust and Technology as Knight Visiting Scholar

During the 2023-24 academic year, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter will return to Annenberg as a visiting scholar with the Center for Media at Risk.

By Julie Sloane

Yoel Roth speaking at the 2023 Annenberg Lecture. 

When it comes to the notions of online harassment and misinformation, it would be hard to find someone more experienced than Yoel Roth (Ph.D. ‘16). Beginning as an intern at Twitter in 2014 and rising over the course of eight years to become its head of Trust and Safety, Roth worked to reduce harassment and harmful disinformation on the platform while preserving as much open expression as possible. 

After working to find and expose Russian disinformation campaigns following the 2016 election, one might assume Roth was prepared for just about anything. But the years to come brought the kind of personal attacks for which no one is prepared: In 2020, President Donald Trump publicly lashed out at Roth for the company’s decision to suspend Trump’s Twitter account. Then in 2022, Twitter’s new owner — the richest person in the world — cited a section of Roth’s doctoral dissertation out of context to smear him on Twitter. The resulting threats to his personal safety led Roth to go as far as to move and sell his house. 

Roth could fill a book with the things he’s seen and learned about trust and safety online, and in the coming year, that’s one of the things he plans to do. 

This fall and spring, Roth will be a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Media at Risk . The position is partly supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation . 

As a visiting scholar, Roth will pursue research around his broadest goal of developing trustworthy technology — how platforms, regulators, and users come together to shape the internet, and what can be done to build technology that is safe for users and aligned with the public interest. 

“The Center for Media at Risk is thrilled to have Yoel on board this academic year, and personally I am delighted by the opportunity to bring him back into the Annenberg community,” says Center Director Barbie Zelizer, who is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication. “Yoel’s career thus far reflects the very highest expectations that come with an Annenberg degree, and I can’t wait to see what he accomplishes on the road ahead.”

Among the research topics that interest Roth is one for which Twitter received criticism: the ways in which governments and tech companies intersect — how governments try to shape the decisions tech companies make, how those companies could and should respond to that pressure, and how the whole process can be made more transparent, accountable and democratic. 

In addition to studying other aspects of transparency, safety, and security on tech platforms, Roth is also interested in exploring ways in which researchers and tech employees have become personally targeted for the work that they do. 

Roth will also use this time to share what he has learned with both the public and the academy, through op-eds, public lectures, journal articles, and more. He is also in the early stages of writing a book unpacking the complex tradeoffs that inform how tech platforms govern online speech and how to make those processes more accountable and trustworthy.

Roth will go back and forth between coasts throughout the year, and he is looking forward to participating once again in the academic life of the Annenberg School. He also plans to teach a course in the Spring. 

“I'm very excited to work with students and serve as a mentor for those who want to apply their doctoral degrees to industry roles,” says Roth. “I also look forward to supporting students and faculty who are pursuing research on internet governance, safety, and security.”

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'This Explains A Lot': Yoel Roth Tweets, PhD Thesis Resurface

'can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers'.

Over the weekend, a myriad of decade-old controversial tweets from former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth surfaced garnering the former tech executive renewed criticism.

I think I may have found the problem @elonmusk https://t.co/rYGLzmSK0R — Eliza (@elizableu) December 10, 2022

Roth provided a link to a November 2010 Salon article in his tweet titled: “ Student-teacher sex: When is it OK? ”

Other surfaced tweets from Roth suggest the former tech executive ran a separate account @otterriffic, which users noted appears to have been scrubbed.

In a 2011 tweet, Roth confirmed the existence of the now-scrubbed account in a March 2011 tweet: “Guilty as charged.”

Grad student I'm staying with: "You're not that innocent. I know about your secret dirty Twitter account." Guilty as charged. (@otterriffic) — Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) March 4, 2011

One user retweeted one of Roth’s @otterriffic tweets, according to another  user .

“#agree. RT @otterriffic Musclebear with beard: hot. Musclebear with beard holding a child: inexplicably hotter,” read the alleged tweet.

Among the aforementioned tweets Roth also made a series of tweets discussing pornography.

“‘Twitter will live to porn another day!’ —Thing I just yelled loudly at work,” said Roth in a late 2015 tweet.

In a 2012 tweet, Roth said , “that awkward moment when you can’t tell whether your neighbor has a really loud infant or is just watching really loud porn.”

“This explains a lot,” Musk said in response to Bleu.

“Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” Musk said, providing a screenshot of Roth’s University of Pennsylvania PhD thesis proposing it was “worth considering” including “individuals under the age of 18” on “gay” and “queer” dating apps including Grindr.

Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis: pic.twitter.com/1NiBohjhMQ — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2022

Roth’s thesis continued:

Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hands as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.

In late October, prior to Roth’s surfaced tweets, Musk shared what appeared to be internal Twitter communications from Roth saying the platform was “literally doing what Elon is accusing us of doing.”

Musk defended the former Twitter executive, saying “we’ve all made some questionable tweets, [myself] more than most.”

“But I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” Musk continued. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.”

We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022

Roth, who subsequently left Twitter in November, discussed his decision in a New York Times op-ed .

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Twitter’s Former Safety Head Forced From Home After Being Smeared by Elon Musk

Shortly after taking over Twitter , self-proclaimed “chief twit” Elon Musk tried to reassure anxious advertisers that the social-media platform “obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.” A month and a half later, the billionaire is continuing to personally demonstrate how it is becoming exactly that.

On Saturday, Musk falsely implied in tweets that Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth — who is gay — has advocated for child sexualization. Roth and his family have since been forced from their home following a torrent of threats and harassment, the Washington Post reported Monday.

Musk had misrepresenting Roth’s academic writing over the weekend, making comments which echoed rhetoric popular among believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory. Per Bloomberg :

Musk participated in a Twitter Spaces Friday night about childhood exploitation, and responded to one of the participants on Saturday after she linked to an old tweet of Roth’s.  “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” tweeted Musk, with an excerpt from the 300-page dissertation. “Gay Data,” the title of Roth’s 2016  dissertation  at the University of Pennsylvania, is about Grindr, the geosocial networking service popular with the LGBTQ+ community. Far-right and extremist voices have long pushed a false claim that LGBTQ+ people are sexual predators who are “grooming” children to abuse them. In September,  the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism  said that “the result of this widespread hateful rhetoric has been a spike in harassment, threats and violence targeting the LGBTQ+ community.”

The subsequent online abuse from Musk supporters hasn’t just been directed toward Roth, according to the Post :

The online mob also sent threats to people Roth had replied to on Twitter, forcing some of Roth’s family and friends to delete their Twitter accounts, according to a person familiar with Roth’s situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to concerns about Roth’s safety. Musk’s followers also directed harassment at professors who reviewed the dissertation that Roth wrote in 2016, as well as at his graduate school, the University of Pennsylvania, the person said. The university did not respond to a request for comment.

Roth’s internal communications at Twitter have been prominently featured in Musk’s ongoing purported exposé of former management’s handling of right-wing content on the platform — though as Intelligencer’s Eric Levitz has argued, the “ Twitter Files ” project is instead demonstrating how “Twitter’s current management is using the platform to promote tendentious, partisan narratives and conservative misinformation.”

Musk’s targeting of Roth was not the first time the billionaire has trafficked in anti-LGBTQ tropes. Just days after taking control of Twitter, Musk tweeted then deleted a news story promoting a baseless conspiracy theory, which deployed a homophobic trope, regarding the brutal recent attack on Paul Pelosi .

On Sunday morning, Musk was at it again, parroting right-wing rhetoric in a tweet both mocking the use of personal pronouns as well as targeting the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor:

In recent weeks, Musk’s Twitter has been systematically restoring the suspended accounts of numerous far-right extremists , including notorious white supremacists, antisemites, and proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Roth and many others have criticized this supposedly free-speech-inspired “general amnesty” plan as dangerous. There has also been evidence of a spike in hate speech on the platform since Musk’s acquisition of the company and subsequent gutting of the company’s workforce.

On Monday night, Twitter also dissolved its Trust and Safety Council , a group of volunteers including civil rights leaders, advocates, and academics from around the world who had been advising the company on ways to reduce hate speech, child exploitation, and other problems on the social media platform.

This post has been updated.

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Yoel roth, ex-twitter exec, forced to flee home amid ‘twitter files’ release: report.

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety was reportedly forced to flee his home due to rapidly intensifying threats from Elon Musk and his supporters.

Yoel Roth, who resigned from Twitter in November, and his family left their Bay Area home this weekend over safety concerns spurred in part by the release of the “Twitter Files.”

Roth has faced mounting threats following the release of the site’s internal documents, which only intensified over the weekend when Musk misrepresented Roth’s academic writing in a tweet, baselessly claiming Roth has a favorable view of pedophilia.

“Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” Musk tweeted Saturday with a screenshot of Roth’s dissertation, the Washington Post reported.

A barrage of threats were sent to people Roth had replied to on Twitter, and the menacing became so intense that several of his family and friends had to delete their Twitter accounts.

Musk’s supporters also directed their online harassment toward professors who reviewed Roth’s dissertation, which was written in 2016, and his graduate school, the University of Pennsylvania.

Roth, who is gay, suggested in his dissertation that gay dating apps like Grindr should adopt safety policies to accommodate teenagers — who already use the apps underage — as a form of harm reduction on social media.

Roth’s role as head of trust and safety at Twitter involved him working on sensitive issues including the suspension of former President Donald Trump’s account in 2021.

With the release of the “Twitter Files,” journalist Bari Weiss shared a series of screenshots allegedly showing internal conversations between Roth and other employees in which they discussed whether to ban Trump’s account, CNN reported.

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Musk had previously been supportive of Roth, but his tune changed when he left the company two weeks after his takeover.

In October, when Roth was still employed by Twitter, Musk was asked about some of his old tweets.

“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.

The incident coincides with Twitter abruptly dissolving its Trust and Safety Council Monday night, further indicating the unraveling of the social media network at the hands of Musk.

I'm Yoel Roth, PhD.

I care about building technology that's resilient to threats and helps people and communities connect safely and authentically.

I’m the VP of Trust & Safety at Match Group , the parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and more than a dozen other dating apps worldwide.

I’m also a Knight Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania , a Technology Policy Fellow at UC Berkeley , and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace . My research and writing focus on trustworthy governance approaches for social media, AI, and other emerging technologies.

At Twitter, I was the Head of Trust & Safety , leading Twitter’s global content moderation, integrity, and account security efforts.

Before joining Twitter, I received my PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. My 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.

Need to reach me?

For speaking engagements, reach out to speaking (at) yoyoel (dot) com .

I'm open to advisory roles for mission-oriented technology companies. Please reach out if you're building or scaling a trust and safety or integrity function and could use advice or guidance. I love helping founders, T&S leaders, and organizations get ahead of complex safety and security issues. You can contact me by email at yoel (at) yoyoel (dot) com .

Writing and research

• 28 February 2024, Y. Roth and S. Lai, " Securing Federated Platforms: Collective Risks and Responses ," Journal of Online Trust and Safety 2(2).
• 27 September 2023, " Getting the Facts Straight: Some Observations on the Fifth Circuit Ruling in Missouri v. Biden ," Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
• 19 September 2023, " Trump Attacked Me. Then Musk Did. It Wasn't an Accident ," New York Times .
• 24 July 2023, " Content Moderation's Legalism Problem ," Lawfare .
• 21 June 2023, " Collective Security in a Federated World ," Atlantic Council DFRLab Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web (annex of the Scaling Trust on the Web report ).
• 24 March 2023, " How Forcing TikTok to Completely Separate its US Operations Could Actually Undermine National Security ," TechDirt .
• 8 February 2023, Testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
• 18 November 2022, " I Was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. This Is What Could Become of It ," New York Times .
• 9 January 2023, " Evidence-Based Misinformation Interventions: Challenges and Opportunities for Measurement and Collaboration ," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace .
• 19 May 2022, " Introducing our crisis misinformation policy ," Twitter Blog. (Introducing a new policy addressing misinformation during moments of armed conflict and other humanitarian crises.)
• 2 December 2021, " Expanding access beyond information operations ," Twitter Blog. (3-year retrospective on IO data-sharing, and launching the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium.)

Press and speaking

• 27 February 2024, " Social Media and Knowledge Production ," Cambridge University Overcoming Polarization Initiative, CounterPol Podcast .
• 18 October 2023, " The Future of the Internet Summit ," Applied Social Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (panel discussion) .
• 10 October 2023, " Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover ," PBS Frontline.
• 27 September 2023, Code 2023 (with Kara Swisher).
• 8 September 2023, " The Twilight of Tech Transparency ," Latsis Symposium 2023: Tackling Online Hate Speech and Strengthening Public Discourse, ETH Zurich.
• 30 August 2023, " The Future of Content Moderation ," TechFreedom Tech Policy Podcast.
• 13 June 2023, " Decentralizing Content Moderation ," Techdirt Podcast .
• 24 April 2023, “ Misinformation is the New Malware ,” RSA 2023 (panel discussion) .
• 21 April 2023, “ What I Was Thinking As We Were Sinking ,” This American Life (with Casey Newton).
• 29 November 2022, On With Kara Swisher: Yoel Roth and the Crisis at Twitter , at Knight Foundation Informed 2022.
• 26 May 2022, " Formulating a rules-based order for the digital age: Big tech in the spotlight ," NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence Dialogues (panel discussion) .
• 2 December 2021, " Tackling online harassment of women in public life ," Annenberg Public Policy Center (panel discussion) .
• 25 August 2021, " Deepfakes, Trust & International Security - Governance Issues and Responses ," United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) Innovations Dialogue (panel discussion) . ( YouTube )
• 25 August 2020, " Are we ready? Foreign interference, disinformation, and the 2020 election ," Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab (panel discussion) .
• 2 March 2020, " Twitter's Head of Site Integrity, on Fighting Election Disinformation ,"  NPR All Things Considered .
• 27 February 2020, " Election info ops: Stories from the social media frontlines ," RSA 2020 (panel discussion) .

'This Explains A Lot': Yoel Roth Tweets, PhD Thesis Resurface

'can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers'.

Over the weekend, a myriad of decade-old controversial tweets from former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth surfaced garnering the former tech executive renewed criticism.

Roth provided a link to a November 2010 Salon article in his tweet titled: " Student-teacher sex: When is it OK? "

Other surfaced tweets from Roth suggest the former tech executive ran a separate account @otterriffic, which users noted appears to have been scrubbed.

In a 2011 tweet, Roth confirmed the existence of the now-scrubbed account in a March 2011 tweet: "Guilty as charged."

One user retweeted one of Roth's @otterriffic tweets, according to another  user .

"#agree. RT @otterriffic Musclebear with beard: hot. Musclebear with beard holding a child: inexplicably hotter," read the alleged tweet.

Among the aforementioned tweets Roth also made a series of tweets discussing pornography.

"'Twitter will live to porn another day!' —Thing I just yelled loudly at work," said Roth in a late 2015 tweet.

In a 2012 tweet, Roth said , "that awkward moment when you can’t tell whether your neighbor has a really loud infant or is just watching really loud porn."

"This explains a lot," Musk said in response to Bleu.

"Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis," Musk said, providing a screenshot of Roth's University of Pennsylvania PhD thesis proposing it was "worth considering" including "individuals under the age of 18" on "gay" and "queer" dating apps including Grindr.

Even with the service's extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can't readily dismiss these platforms out of hands as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.

"But I want to be clear that I support Yoel," Musk continued. "My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs."

Roth, who subsequently left Twitter in November, discussed his decision in a New York Times op-ed .

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Yoel Roth's ‘Gay Data’ dissertation ‘mistakenly’ blocked from UPenn website after Elon Musk’s tweet

Twitter ceo musk targeted former head of 'trust and safety' in recent tweets.

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New York Post’s Jon Levine on the files allegedly showing that Twitter became partisan and supportive of censorship

The University of Pennsylvania temporarily blocked a doctoral dissertation from Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, after new Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted about it.

Musk, who has been purging Twitter employees and exposing the company’s history of anti-conservative bias through the "Twitter Files," was previously laudatory of Roth, tweeting just in October that Roth "has high integrity."

That appears to have changed after Roth announced his resignation from Twitter and published a New York Times op-ed on Nov. 18, declaring that "a Twitter whose policies are defined by edict" via Musk "has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development."

The releasing of new Twitter Files from Substack journalist Matt Taibbi last week also revealed that Roth apparently attended weekly meetings with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence about moderating content ahead of the 2020 election.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk during a T-Mobile and SpaceX joint event on Aug. 25, 2022 in Boca Chica Beach, Texas. ((Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images))

TWITTER FILES PART 3 REVEALS WHAT LED TO TRUMP'S REMOVAL FROM SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM

On Saturday afternoon, Musk tweeted about Roth’s 2016 dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, titled, "Gay Data," which suggested ways to improve the LGBTQ dating app Grindr. Musk highlighted Roth’s argument on Page 248, in which Roth suggested that sites like Grindr should consider "crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases," including for young adults.

"Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis," Musk tweeted.

On Saturday and Sunday, Roth's dissertation was inaccessible on the University of Pennsylvania’s Scholarly Commons website, according to internet archives on Wayback Machine. A note next to the work’s title on the website during that time read, "This paper has been withdrawn."

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Elon Musk walks from the justice center in Wilmington, Delaware, Monday, July 12, 2021.

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The university told Fox News Digital in a statement that the designation was a mistake and has since been corrected.

"On December 10, access to the dissertation of University of Pennsylvania graduate Yoel Roth, Ph.D., was mistakenly closed off on Scholarly Commons, one of the two digital sites on which dissertations by Penn doctoral graduates can be publicly accessed," said Director of Media Relations Ron Ozio.

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"That error triggered a pre-set statement in the vendor’s system inaccurately indicating that the paper had been withdrawn," he said. "The dissertation can now be accessed on both Scholarly Commons and ProQuest."

Roth did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.

Jessica Chasmar is an editor on the politics team for Fox News and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to [email protected].

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Knight Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania; Frmr. Head of Trust & Safety, Twitter

Yoel Roth is a Knight Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, a Technology Policy Fellow at UC Berkeley, and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research and writing focus on trustworthy governance approaches for social media, AI, and other emerging technologies. Previously, he was the 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. Before joining Twitter, Yoel received his PhD 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.

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Twitter’s Former Trust and Safety Chief Is Trying to Clean Up Your Dating Apps

Yoel Roth has spent the past 16 months recovering from a very bad, very public breakup.

For two chaotic weeks after Elon Musk took control of Twitter in October 2022, Roth clung on to his job as the platform’s head of trust and safety. He even won public praise from Musk for his “high integrity.” But Roth ended up walking away from the job that November, and he was quickly targeted with a torrent of harassment, driven partly by lurid accusations from Musk himself and also by “ The Twitter files ,” a dump of internal documents that revealed how Roth and other executives grappled with content moderation decisions.

Roth has kept busy consulting, teaching, and studying decentralized social networks (he now posts on Bluesky). Now, he’s getting back into what he has called the internet sanitation business, as the head of trust and safety at Match Group.

Match Group owns and operates a massive portfolio of dating apps around the world: Match, Tinder, Hinge, The League, OKCupid, BLK, Archer, Azar, Chispa, and more. Roth wrote his 2016 PhD dissertation on how gay culture, identity, and safety intertwine on location-based dating apps, with a focus on Grindr. You might say Roth’s new job is a good match.

Most discussions about online moderation revolve around open social platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook apps, but toxic behavior happens on dating apps too, where most of the dialog happens in one-on-one chats. Scammers and fraudsters have fully infiltrated dating apps—not just Match’s apps but across the whole industry—and Match is in a constant race to use advanced technology to fight scammers wielding the same tools. People on dating apps have suffered real-life harm and violence after meeting up with potential dates. The Medellin Tourism Observatory in Colombia linked several tourist deaths to the dating app Tinder in 2023.

So Roth, who started his new role two weeks ago, will have his hands full, and it’s unclear how many other hands will be on deck to help him manage it. He spoke with WIRED about the challenges of keeping people safe inside dating apps, and how he thinks app stores should share that responsibility, in a conversation that has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Lauren Goode: I’m curious what your job search has been like, given how public your last role ended up being. How did you end up considering trust and safety in the dating app world?

Yoel Roth : Well, I spent the better part of the last year and a half really trying to think of where I can have an active role in trust and safety. Some of that was speaking about the work we did at Twitter, and writing about it. Some of it was teaching. Some of that was doing a bunch of research on federated and decentralized social media.

But then I went back to where it all started for me, 15 years ago, when dating apps were brand-new and Tinder didn't exist yet. I was really interested in safety and privacy on these new services. I ended up writing my PhD dissertation on it. So when an opportunity to consult at the Match Group presented itself, I jumped at it. And then, we had a conversation around, “Should we DTR [define the relationship] and make this official and, like, go steady?” It's not an exaggeration to say this is a dream job for me.

Did Match come to you or did you come to them?

Match came to me.

They swiped right on you.

That’s right.

OK, let’s not extend that metaphor too much. What are you actually going to do as part of this new role as head of trust and safety?

Match Group is a little bit unique because it's a portfolio of brands, not just one company making one app. So we’re really thinking about what a central trust and safety team will look like. I’m a couple of weeks in, and all of this is subject to change—but one area my team is going to be responsible for will be policy and standards development across the whole portfolio, determining which will be consistent and which ones need to be varied by brand.

Another is core safety features, like appeals and the ways users can have recourse when we make decisions. I’m also really excited about building out new protection functions for members, focused on things like scams and financial fraud.

How big will your team be?

TBD. It’s still early days.

I never assume that anyone has read my work, but you may have seen the story I wrote about my run-ins with scammers on Hinge .

Yeah, I did.

At the time that was a pretty persistent problem, which sparked a long rollout of identity verification features. How big of a problem are scammers on Match apps today?

There's never a mission-accomplished moment when it comes to spam or scams or fraud. They are persistent threats that every social media platform has to deal with. The scale of the challenge we deal with right now is already significant. We remove about 44 spam accounts every minute across Match Group apps. It’s a lot.

Each one of them is going to have a slightly different user base, a different profile that it attracts, so that also means they’re a different type of bad actor that’s attracted to it. I’m still learning the ropes, but the goal is not to do this app by app. It’s to think about how we can improve performance across the portfolio.

What we can do is think about the best ways to deploy people against this: How do we understand these problems? How do we build technology that will address them? If we've caught a scammer on Tinder, how do we make sure that they're not popping up on Hinge as well?

How are you thinking about protecting marginalized groups on dating apps, or people living in places where homosexuality is criminalized?

I think that's the trick, right? There are some shared resources that make sense to have as universal, and there are other instances where differentiation within the portfolio is incredibly important. Some people are very comfortable being public about who they are, what they're looking for, putting it all out there. Some people might be more reticent, especially for folks who may be in a more vulnerable position, whether because they're queer and in a country where that's potentially stigmatized, or perhaps they come from a very religious background where online dating is less acceptable.

But there are some areas where we can and should find common ground around things, like fighting scams or offering people the ability to verify that they are who they say they are.

What about protecting underage users on these apps? I know the apps have age requirements, but as you know, people sneak on all forms of social media when they’re underage, and that’s another vulnerable population.

Across the board our apps are for adults. We have sort of a wide range of tactics and techniques that we're using to try to keep underage folks off of our apps. But I think it's worth considering these problems in a broader context of the ecosystem.

We care a lot about identifying underage users and removing them from our products. But I think there's an opportunity for app stores to play a part in this as well. Age assurance and age verification are a challenge that lots of different companies are going to have to wrestle with—it’s included in a number of different pieces of regulation. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing here to keep underage users off of the platforms, but I’d like to see these challenges moved a bit upstream so we have better tools and signals to do that work.

So you’re basically saying, “Let’s pass the buck to Apple and Google”—which some people would probably say is a reasonable suggestion. But then there’s also the web. People can access Match services on the web too.

The vast majority of folks using our products are accessing them through apps rather than through the web. But I also don’t know if I would say it’s “passing the buck.” I think it’s about who is well positioned in the ecosystem to have information about somebody’s age. When you are in a position like an App Store, when you have payment card information, and additional information from somebody’s device, you may have more of a signal around how old they are than just an app would. I think it’s a shared responsibility across the board.

How do you share the responsibility, then, when your users’ physical safety is endangered? Just last week there was a Rest of World report about people in Medellín, Colombia, who have been robbed and in some cases physically harmed by people they’re meeting on dating apps. When something like this happens, how much responsibility does Match Group bear?

I think even one instance of somebody being harmed physically following a connection made on one of our apps is too much. We have a responsibility to do everything within our power to protect our members from that happening.

But there's also limits to what is knowable by a dating app or by a platform, in contrast to a public-conversation app where you can see the entire interaction in front of you. You can look at the text of a tweet, you can evaluate it. IRL interactions are different. Once you make the decision to meet somebody face to face, there’s a lot going on that we as a platform don't know about.

There are things we can do. When our members tell us that they've had a negative interaction, whether it's any type of physical safety risk, assault, financial fraud, we act on those reports immediately. That’s a lot of what my team is going to be doing. A second critical piece of that is working with law enforcement. In Colombia, around the world, we want to make sure that we are empowering local law enforcement to actually get bad guys off the streets and off of our apps as well. And we are proactively referring relevant information to law enforcement in cases where we think there's a physical safety hazard.

I really think the trust and safety industry, collectively, needs to start to approach these as shared problems rather than something that each company handles in isolation. If every company tries to solve a problem independently, you only have line of sight into what's happening on your platform. We are much more effective when we come together as an industry to address risks.

One of the things you wrote in your dissertation about dating apps that I found interesting from a design perspective was that—and I’m paraphrasing—you liked the idea of people having more of an open space to express themselves, versus the drop-down options and other preimposed structures within apps. Do you still feel that way? Why does that create a better experience?

There’s no universal answer to any element of trust and safety or any element of product design. Personally, I think open text fields are better. I like writing, I like expressing myself creatively. But a lot of people don’t want to take the time to think about exactly the right word to explain things, so they’re going to want the option of just entering some of their information and using a drop-down.

WIRED previously covered the trend of people preferring to use Google Docs instead of dating apps—just putting a link out there, sharing a public doc about themselves, sometimes entire chapters. You really do get a sense of who a person is from that.

Right, you get a sense that they’re the type of person who writes a Google Doc about their potential dating life. Which, if I were dating right now, I’d probably be a person who writes a Google Doc about that stuff.

Do you think these apps are really designed to be deleted ?

I do. I met my husband on an app.

Right, coming from a person who had success! But really, in what way do you think they are actually designed to be deleted when the business model, which relies on people swiping continuously and paying monthly fees for a more “premium” experience, supports something entirely different?

There are always going to be reasons that people enter or exit the market for dating or relationships. Some people will exit it because they find a partner and are in a monogamous relationship or a marriage and they choose not to meet or date anyone else. There's also lots of different relationship types and relationships structures. We want to make sure that there are apps available to people at every step on the journey, and it's going to change over time.

I think there are lots of moments where people will get what they're looking for from one of our products, something that enriches their life, and then at a certain point, they'll say, I got what I wanted from that and I’m ready for something different. Our business model fundamentally is about offering people tools to find connections, and that is going to look very different for people at different points in their life.

Any last dating tips for people?

If I had one tip, it’s don't be afraid to show the weirder elements of your personality. The quirky, esoteric things that really make you who you are are the things that will help you find a match that is going to be exactly right for you.

Updated 3/11/2024, 10:25 am ET: We've updated the story to clarify that criminals in Colombia are reportedly targeting people on dating apps generally, but not on Hinge, which doesn't operate in the country.

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Ex-Twitter censor Yoel Roth and his boyfriend are forced to FLEE their $1.1m home after his thesis - which supports letting children use gay hook-up app Grindr - is shared by Elon Musk

• Twitter's former head of trust and safety received a torrent of threats
• Elon Musk implied in tweets that Roth had advocated for child sexualization
• He shared a snip from Roth's PhD thesis, which mentioned under-18s accessing gay hook-up app Grindr
• Roth wrote that, as underage youngsters use the app anyway, an age-appropriate version should be created to offer help to LGBT youth 

By James Gordon For Dailymail.com

Published: 04:00 BST, 13 December 2022 | Updated: 18:36 BST, 9 February 2023

View comments

Twitter's former censor has been forced to flee the $1.1m Bay Area mansion he shares with his boyfriend after Elon Musk shared part of his thesis which suggested letting children access gay hook-up app Grindr.

Yoel Roth, 34, and his partner Nicholas Madsen, 44, moved out of their two-bed, two-bath property in El Cerrito over fears for their safety, after receiving a torrent of threats, the Washington Post reported. 

Musk tweeted: 'Looks like Yoel is in favor of letting children being able to access adult internet services in his PhD thesis.'

He also shared a screenshot of part of the document.  

Roth's thesis, written in 2016 while he was at the University of Pennsylvania, included the claim that many under-18s access gay hook-up app Grindr, despite being too young to do so.

He then suggested that an age-appropriate version of the app be created, to offer support to LGBT youth.   

Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, and his boyfriend have been forced from their home following a torrent of threats and harassment

Elon Musk implied in tweets that Yoel Roth, who is gay, had advocated for child sexualization

Musk implied in more than one tweet that Roth had a permissive view of pedophilia

During his time at Twitter, Roth had huge sway in deciding which posts needed to be removed and accounts suspended.

He also gleefully joked about upcoming meetings with FBI officials in the recently-released Twitter files.

The former trust and safety manager has become emblematic of what free-speech fans say were the problems with Twitter censoring posts that went against a  liberal viewpoint. 

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News of his apparent dealings with the FBI sparked claims the social media network was in bed with the federal government, with the initial tranche of files including requests from the Democrat party to remove unflattering tweets about Hunter Biden. 

Snippets of his communications have been posted in recent days by conservative journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss as part of what Musk has termed the 'Twitter Files'.

Following Musk's tweets, his followers also directed their anger at the professors who reviewed the dissertation, reports The Washington Post.

Roth was a longtime member of Twitter's policy team and was one of the few top executives to remain with the platform in the highly chaotic first weeks  after Musk's $44 billion takeover was approved, which saw around 75 per cent of Twitter staffers fired.

Musk's claims against Roth come just a few weeks after Musk publicly defended Roth from accusations of left-wing bias based on some of his older tweets

Musk's turning on Roth appears to have been sudden. Roth appeared in a call alongside Musk to reassure advertisers shortly after the billionaire's takeover. As recently as late October, Musk tweeted: 'I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to out political beliefs.'

Yoel, similarly, was respectful towards his former boss, and even defended him after his departure from Twitter. 

'I think one of things that is tricky about Elon, in particular, is that people really want him to be the villain of the story, and they want him to be unequivocally wrong and bad, and everything he says is duplicitous. I have to say that wasn't my experience with him.' 

Yoel Roth, 34, seen left in both photos, together with his 44-year-old boyfriend Nicholas Madsen have been forced to leave their family home

On Monday night, Twitter also dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, a group of volunteers including civil rights leaders, advocates, and academics from around the world who had been advising the company on ways to reduce hate speech, child exploitation, and other problems on the social media platform.

The council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives this evening but Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding it shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members.

The council members spoke on condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation. The email said Twitter was 'reevaluating how best to bring external insights' and the council is 'not the best structure to do this.'

'Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal,' said the email, which was signed 'Twitter.'

Share or comment on this article: Ex-Twitter censor Yoel Roth boyfriend forced to FLEE t$1.1m home after Elon Musk shared his thesis

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Twitter’s Former Head of Trust and Safety Forced to Flee Home After Elon Musk Accuses Him of Being a Pedophile

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, has been forced to flee his home after receiving death threats stemming from Elon Musk’s suggesting that Roth is a pedophile, CNN reported on Monday.

Roth, who initially supported Musk after he took control of the platform, resigned on Nov. 10 , saying he had hoped “to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online.”

Over the weekend, Musk shared some of Roth’s past tweets and what appears to be an excerpt from his PhD thesis about Grindr, the LGBTQ social media app. Roth is quoted as saying that the app is possibly too “lewd or hook-up-oriented” for people under age 18 who are already using it, but that providers should “focus on creating safe strategies … for queer young adults” that aren’t just about hook-ups. Musk commented , “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to use adult services in his PhD thesis.” On Monday, the tweet had more than 60,000 likes and received 15,000 retweets.

Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis: pic.twitter.com/1NiBohjhMQ — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2022

Watching Elon launch a digital mob against his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, is one of the most vile and disgusting things I've ever seen. He's putting Yoel's life in danger and he knows it. It's sick, twisted, and sociopathic. pic.twitter.com/eOR6Kt9zuS — Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) December 11, 2022

“Watching Elon launch a digital mob against his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, is one of the most vile and disgusting things I’ve ever seen. He’s putting Yoel’s life in danger and he knows it. It’s sick, twisted, and sociopathic,” tweeted Alejandra Caraballo, a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic.

“ @TwitterSafety appears to no longer be removing death threats,” @conspirator0 noted . “The man being targeted here been forced to flee his home. Choosing to leave these threats online is a sociopathic and evil decision.” The threats they retweeted included a meme of SpongeBob SquarePants and pal Patrick holding open a coffin with the caption, “Groomers get the forever box;” a photo of a military firing squad; and a photo of a prescription bottle filled with bullets that reads “Pedocillin,” with the caption, “You dropped your medication.”

Tech journalist Kara Swisher , who recently called Musk her “greatest disappointment ” in 25 years of covering the industry tweeted, “These cruel attacks by Elon Musk are sickening and based on a purposefully ignorant mischaracterization of @yoyoel ’s work. It also puts him in direct personal danger from people who believe this bull— from the chief s— stirrer.”

A person familiar with the situation told CNN the threats escalated exponentially after Musk endorsed the idea that Roth was a pedophile.

Update: @TwitterSafety appears to no longer be removing death threats. The man being targeted here been forced to flee his home ( https://t.co/IN10ajUpYA ). Choosing to leave these threats online is a sociopathic and evil decision. pic.twitter.com/MpSNw3O1m7 — Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) December 12, 2022

Other anti-Roth tweets compared him to the late Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of sex trafficking minors.

Since taking control of Twitter on October 27, Musk has slashed the company’s staff in half and decimated the safety and moderation departments. He also welcomed back such notoriously banned users as antisemitic rapper “Ye,” ex-President Donald Trump, and neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin.

The new Twitter vice president of Trust and Safety Product Ella Irwin told Reuters earlier this month that the platform is now using more automation to moderate content and eliminating certain reviews that used to be done manually. The focus is now on “restrictions on distribution,” rather than removing hateful speech directly.

Also Read: Elon Musk’s Memo Threatening Twitter Employees Who Leak to the Media Is Leaked to the Media

“The biggest thing that’s changed is the team is fully empowered to move fast and be as aggressive as possible,” she said in the first interview a Twitter executive had given Musk’s takeover.

On Sunday, Musk called for immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci to be prosecuted in a tweet that also mocked the trans community’s use of pronouns. Musk recently announced that COVID-19 misinformation would no longer be flagged on Twitter.

He also threatened to sue any current Twitter employees who leak information to the media and, in November, vowed to go “thermonuclear” on advertisers who had pulled their ads from the platform.

Also Read: Elon Musk Calls for Dr. Fauci to Be Prosecuted Weeks After Twitter Halts COVID-19 Misinformation Policy

An ex-Twitter exec told Congress he had to sell his home after a barrage of 'homophobic and antisemitic' harassment over the 'Twitter Files'

• A former Twitter exec said "homophobic and antisemitic" harassment forced him to sell his home. 
• Yoel Roth testified to Congress that the release of Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" harmed former staff. 
• He said junior employees and staff in other countries were "doxxed" and "threatened." 

A former Twitter executive testified that he was forced to leave and sell his home, after the release of Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" resulted in a barrage of homophobic and antisemitic abuse.

Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday in a hearing about protecting speech from government interference and social media bias, a recording of his testimony reviewed by Insider showed.

During a lengthy hearing related to Twitter's handling with the Hunter Biden laptop story , Roth was asked how the release of Elon Musk's Twitter Files had affected his personal safety. 

He began by saying that the "Twitter Files" also affected more junior employees at Twitter, and that staff as far away as the Philippines were "doxxed, had their families threatened, and experienced harm equal to or greater than what I've experienced." 

He added: "But concurrent with the 'Twitter Files,' Elon Musk also made the decision to share a defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia and this lie led directly to a wave of homophobic and antisemitic threats and harassment against me of which Twitter has removed vanishingly little. 

"And following the Daily Mail's decision to publish where I live, ultimately I had to leave my home and sell it. Those are the consequences for this type of online harassment and speech." 

Related stories

It was previously reported in December 2022 that Roth and his partner had left their home in California. On December 12, MailOnline reported the location of Roth's home and its rough value.

The "Twitter Files" are a series of tweets released under Musk's leadership about "free speech suppression" on the platform under its previous management. Musk accused Roth and other execs of being a part of a secret group that made controversial decisions about limiting the reach of certain accounts without former CEO Jack Dorsey's approval. 

Roth was questioned by Congress alongside other ex-staff including former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and former deputy general counsel James Baker. 

Twitter and Roth did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment about his statements, sent outside of regular business hours. 

Musk smeared Roth in December by baselessly claiming that he supports the sexualization of children. Musk posted an excerpt of Roth's PhD dissertation about "Gay Data" and misconstrued the contents of the paper saying: "Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis." 

Roth quit shortly after Musk's takeover in October over clashes about issues like letting banned right-wing figures such as Donald Trump return to the platform. 

In a New York Times op-ed at the time, Roth wrote: "A Twitter whose policies are defined by edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development."

• Main content

Elon Musk steps up attacks on Twitter’s former safety head Yoel Roth

Elon Musk on 11 December posted tweets including an excerpt of Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation Saturday that suggested the former Twitter executive is an advocate for child sexualization — a baseless trope that leaves Roth susceptible to online abuse.

Yoel is on the right

Celebrity wiki :

Yoel Roth is the Head of Site Integrity at Twitter … Kellyanne Conway accused Yoel Roth of constantly attacking Trump voters. Earlier, he referred to Trump and his team as “ACTUAL NAZIS,” mocked Trump supporters by saying “we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”

Yoel Roth made an entire career out of intellectualizing his homosexual fetishes — even writing his PhD dissertation on his random GRINDr encounters. He then got put in charge of censoring “hate speech” on twitter. A path to power and a reality most GOP voters aren’t aware of. This was the guy who 10 years ago, GOP pundits were saying would ” get a taste of the real world” and be “shocked back to reality” when he got out of college. Instead he banned the president from twitter because he hated conservatives and white people.

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