Yoel Roth
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yoyoel.com
Yoel Roth
@yoyoel.com
75K followers 260 following 810 posts
Internet sanitation enthusiast and full-time corgi wrangler.
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yoyoel.com
Genuinely baffled by the unempirical assertion that Community Notes “works.” Does it? How do Meta know? The best available research is pretty mixed on this point.

And as they go all-in on an unproven concept, will Meta commit to publicly releasing data so people can actually study this?
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.
January 7, 2025 at 3:08 PM
yoyoel.com
How the email found me
A beheaded man holding his own head, not looking especially thrilled about the whole situation
November 17, 2024 at 12:11 PM
yoyoel.com
How the email found me
An extremely unhappy nun
November 16, 2024 at 1:22 PM
yoyoel.com
Election Day timeline cleanse, featuring Toast and Rye
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
November 6, 2024 at 12:01 AM
yoyoel.com
Look at these tiny little penguins!
Two Australian little penguins, a small blue-gray bird with a white belly
October 11, 2024 at 8:11 AM
yoyoel.com
We shall call her Toast, destroyer of gardens
A black and white corgi puppy sitting on gray gravel eating a green fern
August 17, 2024 at 6:31 PM
yoyoel.com
The corgis wish you a happy Friday.
Two black and white corgis sitting on a white sofa
August 16, 2024 at 7:40 PM
yoyoel.com
An especially happy Friday to Rye, who is doing a remarkably good job not eating Toast for lunch despite her constant barking and face-biting.
Two black and white corgis, one 10 months old, the other 10 years old, on a gray stone patio.
August 9, 2024 at 11:51 PM
yoyoel.com
This is the face of someone who just chewed up a bunch of the irrigation system and feels no remorse whatsoever.
A black and white corgi puppy standing in between two large green ferns
August 7, 2024 at 5:48 PM
yoyoel.com
She fell asleep in her water bowl.
A black and white corgi puppy asleep with her face in a blue and gray water bowl
July 31, 2024 at 7:47 PM
yoyoel.com
Update: Rye and Toast have reached a peaceful coexistence.
Two black and white corgis, one 10 years old, the other 9 weeks old, curled up napping side by side.
July 28, 2024 at 11:03 PM
yoyoel.com
Meet Toast!
A black and white dog with very large ears and her tongue sticking out
July 28, 2024 at 1:33 AM
yoyoel.com
Sounds right to me www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
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.
May 18, 2024 at 12:13 AM
yoyoel.com
Just came back to my hotel room to find that someone left me complimentary reading material, and honestly, I’m not mad at the selection.
A German-language book called “Warrior Cats” that mysteriously appeared in my hotel room at some point this afternoon
May 13, 2024 at 4:00 PM
yoyoel.com
I’m in Australia for meetings and was telling someone how cute I find the kangaroo and emu in the Australian coat of arms. Without missing a beat, the guy I was talking to said, “Lots of countries have animals in their coats of arms, but Aussies are the only ones who eat the animals in ours.”
The Australian coat of arms, featuring a kangaroo and an emu who look like they absolutely do not fuck around
April 23, 2024 at 11:55 PM
yoyoel.com
How the email found me
An angel with a lute who honestly isn’t that pleased about everything going on
April 12, 2024 at 7:54 PM
yoyoel.com
Maybe I completely missed this when it happened, but was there ever any coverage of the fact that Wikileaks now quietly throw a 500 error when you try to access the 2016 DNC hack-and-leak?

Literally nothing else on the Wikileaks site errors out in this way.
A screenshot of an attempt to access the "DNC Emails" page on Wikileaks, returning an Internal Server Error
April 11, 2024 at 1:44 PM
yoyoel.com
How the email found me
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)
April 10, 2024 at 11:39 PM
yoyoel.com
This is a really good conversation between Nilay Patel and Cloudflare's CEO. www.theverge.com/24121399/clo...

I especially like this bit re: content moderation's usual failure conditions — which have little to do with moderation, and everything to do with a lack of institutional trust.
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.
April 8, 2024 at 5:49 PM
yoyoel.com
New paper from me and @samlai.bsky.social out today in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, looking at the moderation capabilities of federated and decentralized social media, and what needs to happen to make these platforms resilient to online harms.

doi.org/10.54501/jot...
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.
February 29, 2024 at 5:12 PM
yoyoel.com
Every once in a while, you come across a sentence that really drives home the crazy scale Apple is operating at these days, and this is one of those sentences.
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.”
November 29, 2023 at 12:03 AM
yoyoel.com
This guy is 9 years old today! I still remember what a tiny little nugget he was the day we brought him home. Happy birthday, Rye!
Rye, a black and white cardigan welsh corgi, age 9 Rye, age 8 weeks
November 18, 2023 at 4:41 PM
yoyoel.com
The San Francisco doom spiral has entered the “emitting beams of light” stage, apparently
Photo of the San Francisco skyline featuring a light projection installation
November 14, 2023 at 5:53 PM
yoyoel.com
Reading @matt-levine.bsky.social’s newsletter is frequently the highlight of my day, and today is no exception. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
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?
November 6, 2023 at 11:45 PM
yoyoel.com
This piece from @jameeljaffer.bsky.social about the social media cases before SCOTUS is packed to the brim with absolute gems, but going into 2024’s elections, this bit stands out as especially important:
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.
October 31, 2023 at 11:39 AM