Yoel Roth

@yoyoel.com

79493 Followers 258 Following

Internet sanitation enthusiast and full-time corgi wrangler.

Apparently a child who was stung by a bee, but idk Rijksmuseum this honestly seems like demonic possession at the very least
A cherub, not pleased, having its throat slit
NOTICE AND TAKEDOWN Every day, thousands of removal requests flow into the Lumen Database — the public archive where the internet's most powerful actors are forced to show their work. Most requests are routine. Some are weapons. When copyright attorney Marcus Vega files a takedown notice targeting Clearwire, a scrappy digital rights nonprofit, he expects the usual: compliance, a form letter, maybe a sternly worded reply. What he gets instead is Eli Marsh - Clearwire's counternotice specialist, former EFF researcher, and the most infuriating person Marcus has ever had the professional misfortune of opposing. Eli knows the law. He also knows Marcus - knows his firm's clients, his win rate, the pattern of industries he protects. What Eli can't account for is what happens when the two of them end up at the same internet governance conference in Geneva, arguing in bad faith over cocktails until they're not arguing at all.
Dear Mr. Roth,    I am not sure how it happened, but you are right that I made a mistake in treating the words quoted from your essay as a representation of your views.  It may be that when I returned to your essay (which I had previously read) in finishing a draft of the book, I interpreted the bolded text as a “pull quote.”  That was a mistake, for which I am extremely sorry.  It was my mistake and not that of my co-author.    I am working with Princeton University Press to have that sentence deleted from the book (all future printings and the Kindle edition).  Once the Press’s offices re-open after January 2, we will explore the possibilities for an errata statement on the book’s web pages.  I will also send out a message on Twitter acknowledging the mistake in misleadingly using the passage from your essay.    I want to offer you my sincere apologies for this very regrettable mistake.  My aim and that of my co-author has been to try to cast some light on difficult and important matters about which there is much disagreement.  It is far from my intention to mislead concerning the pandemic and decisions made in response to it.  Our book has 935 footnotes, but this was not a footnoting error.  I deeply regret having made this mistake.   Sincerely,    Stephen Macedo  
Dear Princeton University Press Editorial Team, I am writing to request a correction to In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. The book contains a significant misquotation that inverts the meaning of my published work. In 2023, I published an article for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University titled "Getting the Facts Straight: Some Observations on the Fifth Circuit Ruling in Missouri v. Biden." In that piece, I directly refuted false claims about government jawboning of social media platforms. One claim I specifically pushed back against was the myth that the FBI demanded Twitter censor online speech. And yet, I was recently surprised to find that In Covid's Wake quotes me as stating that "the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands" — the exact claim I was refuting, presented as though I endorsed it. The book uses my refutation of a false narrative to support that very narrative, employing my name, former position, and scholarly writing to buttress the authors' argument at the expense of the integrity of my own views. This is not a case of authors disagreeing with my interpretation or selectively quoting from a nuanced argument. The book attributes to me a position that is the precise opposite of what I argued. The passage the authors quote is a section heading that introduces my refutation of that claim, not an endorsement of it. The misrepresentation is particularly harmful because it lends Princeton University Press's credibility to demonstrably false claims about government censorship. My article exists specifically to establish what actually happened versus what conspiracy theories allege. By quote-mining a section heading and divorcing it from the argument that follows, the book weaponizes my attempt to establish facts against the truth itself.
The FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands In the Fifth Circuit's analysis, the line between permissible information sharing and threat alerting and coercive moderation demands is a porous one. If representatives of the government share indicators of compromise (IOCs) with private sector entities, is a coercive demand to take some kind of action implicit in that sharing? The Fifth Circuit takes this to be the case: ... we do find the FBI's requests came with the backing of clear authority over the plattorms. Atter all, content moderation requests "might be inherently coercive if sent by ... [al law enforcement officer." ... although the FBI's communications did not plainly reference adverse consequences, an actor need not express a threat aloud so long as, given the circumstances, the message intimates that some form of punishment will follow noncompliance.® The implications of this argument are striking. The Fifth Circuit appears to hold that any information-sharing from the FBI to platforms is de facto coercive, simply by virtue of who it originated with. Even in situations where platforms actively solicit information from the government-as was regularly the case on election security matters between platforms and the FBI-the resulting communications are taken to be coercive because of the FBI's standing as a law enforcement entity.
A passage from the book In Covid’s Wake, with a highlighted sentence reading: “Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, states that "the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands," including demands involving domestic speech.”
We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.
A beheaded man holding his own head, not looking especially thrilled about the whole situation
An extremely unhappy nun
Two black and white corgis sitting on a white and gray rug on top of a dark brown wood floor, in front of a metal and wood bookshelf
Two Australian little penguins, a small blue-gray bird with a white belly
A black and white corgi puppy sitting on gray gravel eating a green fern
Two black and white corgis sitting on a white sofa
Two black and white corgis, one 10 months old, the other 10 years old, on a gray stone patio.
A black and white corgi puppy standing in between two large green ferns
A black and white corgi puppy asleep with her face in a blue and gray water bowl
Two black and white corgis, one 10 years old, the other 9 weeks old, curled up napping side by side.
A black and white dog with very large ears and her tongue sticking out
The Toilet Theory of the Internet CHARLIE WARZEL TECHNOLOGY | THE ATLANTIC Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online-clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares-is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.
A German-language book called “Warrior Cats” that mysteriously appeared in my hotel room at some point this afternoon
The Australian coat of arms, featuring a kangaroo and an emu who look like they absolutely do not fuck around
An angel with a lute who honestly isn’t that pleased about everything going on
A screenshot of an attempt to access the "DNC Emails" page on Wikileaks, returning an Internal Server Error
An illuminated manuscript depicting the bust of a woman who simply CANNOT with the serpents about to eat her (the serpents aren’t especially feeling it either)
But I think that the thing that we’ve done is that when we have come to these hard issues, we haven’t just said, “Paragraph 13G of our terms of service, beyond that, no comment.” We’ve tried to walk through: here’s why this is hard and here’s why we struggle with it and here’s the good and here’s the bad and here’s why these are tricky issues. It just happens to be that neo-Nazis are about the grossest thing that you could imagine, and so people who are trying to be gross either are or pretend to be neo-Nazis. So you get tough conversations around this. What’s different about us than other companies is that we’re willing to talk about it, whereas most other companies don’t. The reason we’re willing to do that is that I think transparency is key to trust.
Screenshot of the first page of the journal article linked in this post. The screenshot contains the title, authors, abstract, and first two paragraphs of the introduction. The full PDF of the article is available at the link in the post.
Macworld article excerpt: “A new report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg (fave.co/3tW4Ype) gives some insight into Apple’s plans to revamp its AirPods line. According to the report, Apple plans to overhaul the entire AirPods line starting next year and continuing through 2025. The AirPods were once viewed as just an accessory, but now sell tens of millions of units a year and bring in an estimated $15 billion to $20 billion in revenue. On their own, the AirPods would be a Fortune 500 company.”
Rye, a black and white cardigan welsh corgi, age 9
Photo of the San Francisco skyline featuring a light projection installation
Someone programmed a robot with Elon Musk’s sense of humor Seems bad? Also though it “has real-time access to info via the X platform,” formerly known as Twitter, “which is a massive advantage over other models.” Is it? Isn’t Twitter/X where people go to post lies and jokes? I just? “I have programmed a robot with Elon Musk’s business acumen and engineering skills,” terrific. “I have programmed a robot with Elon Musk’s Twitter jokes, and also everybody else’s Twitter jokes,” why? What is that robot for? Is the answer “getting engagement on Twitter”? Why?
Construing First Amendment rights so broadly that the government is precluded from sharing information and from encouraging powerful private corporations to act on it would compromise public discourse, not protect it. We need a First Amendment framework that can distinguish government speech that informs the platforms’ editorial autonomy from government speech that overrides it.
Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, decrying the lack of preparation of everyone around her
Notable U.S. Requests We go out of our way to prioritize user privacy and freedom of speech, particularly in the context of legal requests to unmask account holders. Here are some of the most notable requests we received between January and June 2023 where we pushed back based on these principles: Reddit received a subpoena seeking information on an account with strong indications that it belonged to a journalist and/or protest organizer. As a result of our objections, law enforcement withdrew the request. Reddit received a court order extending the non-disclosure period for a search warrant, despite the fact that law enforcement announced the investigation and related Reddit account to the public through the press. Reddit challenged the non-disclosure order in court; however, the court ultimately sided with law enforcement. Reddit received a search warrant seeking information on eight accounts. One of the accounts posted about a crime, while the other accounts were commenters who
The sum of this is that today, government pressure to carry or amplify certain kinds of speech that platforms would otherwise not is at least as great a threat to the public square as pressure to suppress it. This long-running effort is also a form of jawboning, and controversial laws on social media content moderation in Florida and Texas and congressional hearings over unsubstantiated allegations based on the “Twitter Files” are extensions of it. Censorship and propaganda are complementary: Political actors use both to control the public square, and rarely does one exist without the other. This logic is what allows conservatives to decry content moderation and cancel culture even as they pull books from library shelves, or burn them. The two positions are connected, not contradictory, and together they represent a far greater threat to public discourse than anything in the Missouri v. Biden case. This is evident from the consequences that platforms have already faced in practice: Exe
Daily Caller headline that reads, “Twitter’s former top censor shocked that banning the president would make people upset”
Google Threat Analysis Group update identifying a Mastodon account - @paul091_@infosec.exchange - as connected to a North Korean APT.
A screenshot of this tweet: https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes/status/1697036063045239017
Anya from Buffy singing about bunnies, but with bots substituted for bunnies
Pop up notification asking to share my iPhone screen with AppleCare
With the regime’s power over the country secured, there is less jeopardy for the government in blocking Facebook. “We see that as a real threat now,” says Golda Benjamin, Asia-Pacific campaigner with Access Now. “Because the election is over, I think there’s a real threat of blocking the platform and then also threatening the physical presence of any Facebook staff in Cambodia.” The threat of a ban complicates Meta’s decisionmaking, and introduces both commercial and freedom-of-speech considerations into its deliberations: Is it better for the platform to enforce its policy strictly and risk millions of people losing access to information and services, or to compromise its policy—and the integrity of the Oversight Board—to keep them online?
Our commitment: Upon assessing Hun Sen’s Facebook Page and Instagram account, we determined that suspending those accounts outside our regular enforcement framework would not be consistent with our policies, including our protocol on restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest. Considerations: We have removed the content that was the subject of this case and, consistent with our policies, applied appropriate account-level penalties associated with that action. There is not currently any basis to suspend Hun Sen’s account under our policies.
When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us. They say we live in a “clown world”, are stuck in “the matrix” of “groupthink”, are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called “mass formation psychosis” (a made-up term). The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality – we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation. For instance, in July 2022, Wolf went on a rightwing podcast carried by something called Today’s News Talk and shared what she described as her “latest thinking”. She had noticed that when she went into New York City, where the vast majority of the population has been vaccinated, the people felt … different. In fact, it was as if they were not people at all.
Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation 
Facebook and YouTube are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election
A black and white corgi laying on an orange bedspread
A black and white corgi with his head behind a door, for reasons.
Dead pixels, maybe?, at the edge of a TV screen
How well-aligned are GPT-4's verdicts with the specific policies companies provide, rather than a generic version of "hate" or "toxicity"? How consistent are decisions made by LLMs — and, especially importantly for platforms eyeing Digital Services Act compliance, can companies readily explain those decisions when they're required to do so? Can ChatGPT moderation deal with the nuances of coded speech and reclaimed slang? Does it work in languages other than English and cultural contexts other than the United States? “AI for moderation might have great answers to all of these questions,” Roth told me, “but we need actual, comparative data-driven answers to know for sure.”
Chrome performance monitor screenshot of an attempt to load a t[.]co link pointing to the New York Times
“People also ask” panel in google search results showing two drop downs: “What happened to Shingy?” and “What is the job description of a digital prophet?”
Twitter “sensitivity settings” for advertisements showing a “conservative” option that lets brands decide not to run ads next to spam
Photo of a black and white corgi staring at a blank wall
Google said demand for its Perspective API, an Al classifier designed to flag toxic online speech, has shot through the roof, with generative Al firms needing it to police chatbot text and other Al output. (Alex Pasternack / Fast Company)
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