Yoel Ross. Image: Knight Foundation/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Roth became a well-known figure in Twitter in the initial period of Musk’s takeover, but resigned when dramatic changes began to occur in the company.
Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s trust and safety division, has been appointed to a similar role with Tinder owner Match Group.
Match Group holds a massive portfolio in the online dating sector, being the parent company behind various dating brands such as Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and OurTime.
Roth shared the announcement on LinkedIn and said he started studying trust and safety 15 years ago because the “then-new world of dating apps felt like the Wild West”.
“It’s truly a dream come true to get to roll up my sleeves and work to protect the millions of people making connections on our apps worldwide,” Roth said.
A history with Twitter
Roth worked in Twitter for more than seven years and claims to have built the company’s site integrity team from zero staff to 60 between 2018 and 2022. By the time Twitter acquired by Elon Musk, Roth was head of Twitter’s trust and safety and led its content moderation, integrity and account security teams.
Roth emerged as a public-facing figure for Twitter in the initial period of Musk’s takeover, as he posted multiple threads on the platform to explain feature updates to users.
But Roth quit Twitter a couple of months after Musk’s takeover, during the period when the site was introducing its $8 monthly subscription-for-verification changes. Multiple top executives resigned during this period, which closely followed the announcement of mass layoffs across Twitter’s global workforce.
In one interview in 2022, Roth said that his resignation was not an easy decision but that he felt unable to avert “the next disaster” for the company, Arts Technica reported.
He also claims that he had warned about the issues of Twitter Blue verification and that it failed in “exactly the ways we said it would”. The first version of Twitter Blue saw a wave of fake accounts with verified badges impersonating company brands or public figures.
Roth also claimed that Twitter was being “ruled by dictatorial edict” under Musk’s leadership and that this was another reason he left the company, Reuters reports. He also claimed that the release of the ‘Twitter Files’ led to significant harassment for himself and other Twitter staff members.
Twitter has changed significantly since Roth’s time at the company, as it received the X rebrand last year. The site has also been criticised for allowing misinformation to spread on various topics, such as the conflict taking place between Israel and Hamas in Palestine.
X is also being investigated by the EU for potentially not complying with the rules of the Digital Services Act. The made X the first ‘Very Large Online Platform’ to be subject to formal proceedings under this Act.
Yoel Ross. Image: Knight Foundation/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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