Dr. Yoel Roth: Online Safety and Security

On Oct. 23, 2024, Dr. Yoel Roth gave a lecture titled as “Decentralizing online safety and security: The promises and perils of federated social media” hosted by the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at University of Washington, and a number of CDSC faculty and students were present and discussed issues of digital governance with Dr. Roth. 

Years of dedicated research, activism, regulatory efforts, and investment by civil society and technology companies have increased awareness and established some control over the harmful impacts of social media platforms. Today, as social media undergoes its most significant transformation in over a decade—with alternative platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads gaining traction in the wake of Twitter’s decline—there is optimism about these new platforms and their potential for alternative governance models that offer users greater empowerment. Dr. Roth has highlighted how self-organizing practices in these emerging communities are constructing norms for content moderation in decentralized platforms, which resonates with a number of research conducted by our research group (see Colglazier, TeBlunthuis, & Shaw, 2024). 

However, these platforms retain many of the same design features and risks for misuse as mainstream platforms, yet lack the robust moderation and detection systems that have been painstakingly developed elsewhere. Additionally, significant technological, governance, and financial challenges hinder the development of these essential safeguards. Drawing on empirical research into platform moderation capacities, Dr. Roth examines the complex outcomes of this transformation in social media and suggests the following potential solutions for collective safety and addressing security risks identified: (1) institutionalize shared responses to critical harms, (2) build transparent governance into the system, (3) invest in open-source tooling, and (4) enable data sharing across instances (Roth & Lai, 2024). 

References

Colglazier, C., TeBlunthuis, N., & Shaw, A. (2024, May). The Effects of Group Sanctions on Participation and Toxicity: Quasi-experimental Evidence from the Fediverse. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 18, pp. 315-328).Roth, Y., & Lai, S. (2024). Securing federated platforms: Collective risks and responses. Journal of Online Trust and Safety, 2(2).