• by Colin Kirkland , February 28, 2024

Bluesky, the decentralized X competitor founded by ex-Twitter head Jack Dorsey, has hired Aaron Rodericks as its new Head of Trust and Safety.

Rodericks previously co-led the Trust and Safety team at Twitter. He was fired after Elon Musk cut half of the Election Integrity team. 

Before joining a promising competitor in the microblogging social media space, Rodericks became part of the public discourse last year when right-wing social-media personalities called him out for seeking more content-moderation staffers ahead of the 2024 election who had “a passion for protecting the integrity of elections and civic events.”

Soon after, Rodericks lost his job at X during Musk’s slashing of the platform’s content-moderation teams.

With regard to the Election Integrity team, Musk -- who was introducing his “free speech” makeover of the platform formerly known as Twitter -- posted that it “was undermining election integrity,” adding: “Yeah, they’re gone.”

“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 announcing his new position at Bluesky. “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.”

Rodericks went on to show his enthusiasm around the concepts that align with Bluesky’s overall goal of making a social-media platform that allows its users to curate their own experiences with personal development freedoms and individual-specific moderation settings. 

“Communities also need the ability to self-organize around more opinionated moderation principles and have the tooling to keep these efforts sustainable,” Rodericks said, adding 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.”

The company says Rodericks will be responsible for leading the moderation team, which provides 24/7 coverage -- adding that reports are to be reviewed in under 24 hours and appeals are to be reviewed and responded to by a “globally dispersed” moderation team that covers multiple languages with “follow-the-sun coverage across time zones.”

The need for content moderation on Bluesky is now more crucial, as the platform left a private beta phase earlier this month. Upon opening up the public, the platform has amassed millions of new users and is now up to over 5 million registered users. 

Due to its decentralized nature, and eventual federation -- which allows users and communities to set their own preferences alongside external moderation services and blocklists -- Bluesky’s moderation requirements utilize a more complex approach than centralized platforms like X and Meta’s Threads.