Aaron Roderix loves his job, even if it’s not for the faint of heart.
“I wouldn’t recommend my job to most people,” he said with a laugh. “That would be an honest response.”
As head of trust and safety at Bluesky Social, Rodericks is responsible for ensuring that one of the fastest-growing social media platforms doesn’t become a playground for trolls, misinformation, and election interference.
“The best thing about working in trust and safety is that you never know what you’re going to be working with,” Roderix said in an interview from his home office in Dublin. “The challenge is that so many things can go wrong from moment to moment.”
Last week, Rodericks himself was the target of attacks on his platform, including messages from accounts set up with names such as “Fire Aaron Rodericks.”
“People like to disagree with moderation decisions,” he says. “It happens often.”
Overseeing a social media platform that has grown from 5 million users to more than 25 million in 10 months is about as much as Roderix’s former career as a federal civil servant can take.
Born in Mumbai, India, Rodericks and his family came to Canada as a child. First in Toronto, then in Montreal’s West Island, and finally in the Ottawa suburb of Stittsville. After earning a bachelor’s degree in public affairs and policy management from Carleton University, Roderix followed in his father’s footsteps and began working for the federal government.
Over the course of 13 years, I worked in several departments including Immigration, International Affairs, and the Finance Committee, often in jobs that involved innovation and the online world. In 2019, he left the government and moved to Ireland due to his wife’s job opportunity.
Roderix immediately joined Twitter in May 2019 as co-head of trust and safety, working to stop threats on the platform, including election interference, misinformation and disinformation.
Roderix calls her work at Twitter an “amazing experience.”
“It was great to have my first experience working in the technology industry, just seeing the huge difference in terms of speed, products and how quickly we can move,” he said. Ta. “In one case, I certainly spent four years trying to get a briefing note through government leaders and get it approved, but no one knew if they had the appropriate authority.
“It was really amazing to put yourself in these different environments where the perfect is the enemy of the good.While in government, you were always trying to achieve perfection, but before you launched you And once I launched it, it was perfect.”I’ll never touch it again.”
“On Twitter, on the other hand, you launched your best effort. You posed this issue to smart people. You saw how they handled it.”
Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2023, rebranded it as “X,” and fired many employees, including Roderix.
Mr. Roderix joined Bluesky in February as part of a staff of approximately 20 people working remotely in various countries.
Roderix said being Canadian helps her in her work.
“I think my Canadian side has also given me a different perspective on speech. When you’re trying to apply trust and security in terms of principles and policies, things like peace, order and good government are also important. It’s built into my mindset,” he said.
“We always try to strike a balance between achieving full freedom of speech for everyone and not being too restrictive.”
Roderix said being Canadian also means thinking “in terms of soft power.”
“I think about that kid all the time,” he said. “When I worked at Twitter, I was always thinking about what impact it has on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities, and how those impacts impact countries.”
Aaron Roderix, head of trust and safety at BlueSky Social and former co-head of election integrity at Twitter, said the threat of foreign election interference online has evolved in recent years. , says the next federal election will be even more complicated.
For example, election interference in one country can result in far more violence and harm on the ground than in another, he said.
Roderix said his experience in the federal civil service, with its emphasis on neutrality and impartiality, served him well in his work at Twitter and BlueSky.
“That allowed me to be very talented, especially in briefings on Twitter, when I was trying to distill a complex emerging issue down to a few points and get leadership to make decisions on that issue. ” he said.
It also helps in dealing with the government, he said.
“I understand where they’re coming from,” he said. “Governments tend not to like what they don’t understand or don’t know, so in many cases just getting them to understand the context and the problem is enough.”
Although Bluesky hasn’t yet experienced some of the issues plaguing X, Rodericks sees signs that malicious actors and spam networks are trying to gain a foothold.
Rodericks said Canada has seen fewer attempts at election interference than many other countries. But he also warned that threats are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to detect. Previous interference was caused by Russians hired to disrupt the election through social media posts or by agents posting messages on the ground.
He said a new threat now facing Canada’s upcoming election comes from influencers who are paid behind the scenes by foreign governments through false proxies. He cited allegations in a U.S. lawsuit involving Tenet Media.
“By the time influencers start sending out messages that happen to be consistent with foreign actors… there’s so much denial and clipping in that space that it’s very difficult to trace back,” Roderix said. “It’s very difficult to detect these days.
“Those are the kinds of things that really concern me in this election and other elections going forward.”
