Startups

Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk

Comment

blue sky with white clouds
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Emerging decentralized social network and X rival Bluesky has just landed a notable former Twitter leader as its new head of Trust and Safety. On Wednesday, the company announced it has appointed Aaron Rodericks, who most recently co-led the Trust and Safety team at Twitter, to this new position.

Though typically leaders below the C-Suite don’t make headlines, Rodericks became known more publicly after becoming the target of a right-wing campaign on X. Influencers noticed an announcement on LinkedIn last year that indicated he was looking to hire more staffers ahead of the coming 2024 elections.

His callout had asked for users who had a “passion for protecting the integrity of elections and civic events,” which caught the attention of right-wing personalities like Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok) and former Trump State Department official Mike Benz — the latter who remarked that Rodericks was a former colleague of Yoel Roth and was “somehow” still at X. (Roth, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety had left the company just two weeks after Elon Musk’s acquisition. Musk initially defended Roth, but after his departure, he attacked the exec on X. Roth then had to flee his home after receiving death threats.)

Image Credits: Bluesky/Aaron Rodericks

Last fall, Rodericks lost his job at X when Musk cut half of the election integrity team after promising to expand it, The Information had reported at the time. Musk confirmed the cuts on X with a sneer, saying “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

With Rodericks’ hiring, then, Bluesky is sending a signal to its would-be users. It’s an indication that the network will approach trust and safety similarly, if not better, than Twitter once did, before Musk’s takeover.

It’s a timely choice for the young startup given that it has already experienced high-profile fumbles in this area before even opening its doors to the public. The network earlier strained its relationship with Black users after a moderation policy change that followed a death threat against a user had many questioning if the platform was safe for marginalized communities. In another incident, Bluesky came under fire as it allowed usernames with racial slurs to slip past its moderation efforts. Bluesky then haphazardly addressed the problem via personalized apologies in emails to those who reached out, but said nothing publicly.

As Bluesky has now opened to the public, there’s a need for Trust and Safety to be more established on its network, despite its decentralized ethos and roll-your-own moderation. As the operator of what will become the main Bluesky server, even after federation kicks in, Bluesky has a responsibility to meet the moderation needs of its now more than 5 million users. Unlike centralized platforms like Twitter/X and Meta’s Threads, moderation on Bluesky includes several layers. Server operators like the company itself can set rules for their own servers, but these can be complemented by other tools like moderation services and blocklists that are more community-led.

“There is an urgent global need for a social network that can safely and effectively meet the needs of communities and individuals,” said Rodericks, in a statement about his hiring. “People expect social media to provide a healthy level of built-in moderation, with clearly stated rules that are applied consistently. However, we’ve seen that this alone is not enough. Communities also need the ability to self-organize around more opinionated moderation principles and have the tooling to keep these efforts sustainable. I’m excited that Bluesky is taking both of these layers seriously, and I believe that their fresh approach to user choice with stackable moderation is poised to become a key part in guiding and growing healthy online conversations,” he added.

Bluesky says Rodericks will lead the moderation team that provides 24/7 coverage to uphold the Bluesky Community Guidelines and promises reports are reviewed in under 24 hours. Soon, Bluesky will allow users to subscribe to independent moderation services that will be applied on top of the existing moderation service it offers.

Before working at Twitter, where he dealt with issues like hate speech and harassment, Rodericks worked on developing capabilities within the Canadian Federal Government for social data analytics in destabilized states, along with researching extremist activity that helped launch the Global Coalition against Daesh, Bluesky noted.

“I’m deeply invested in how our users can best control their social spaces online,” said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in a statement. “Aaron’s expertise in trust & safety at global scale brings invaluable experience to our moderation team. His interest in improving the foundation for public conversations will help us design customizable and resilient moderation systems that will let users build vibrant, personalized communities,” she said.

Bluesky is now open for anyone to join

More TechCrunch

The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products

AI chip startup DEEPX secures $80M Series C at a $529M valuation 

A dust-up between Evolve Bank & Trust, Mercury and Synapse has led TabaPay to abandon its acquisition plans of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.

Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans

The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and…

Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract

Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…

Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed

In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.

Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.

Bumble says it’s looking to M&A to drive growth

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…

Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool

Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.

Groww joins the first wave of Indian startups moving domiciles back home from US

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

Featured Article

Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.

15 hours ago
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine maker, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI (unified payments interface) payments rail by one to two years, sources…

India likely to delay UPI market caps in win for PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?