What keeps Bluesky’s head of trust and safety up at night?

We have talked a lot on this podcast about the death of social media and the rise of algorithmic platforms. But what if there was a better way?

What if we could go back and fix the mistakes of Web 2.0 with new tech?

“ The company fascinates me… because they have such interesting concepts internally. One of them being ‘treat the company as a future adversary,’ which I have never seen anywhere in my career.”

What would truly modern social media look like, and who would be responsible for making sure it doesn’t… turn out the way things did last time?

These are weighty questions that I lob this week at Aaron Rodericks, a Canadian working in Dublin as Bluesky’s head of trust and safety. In town to speak at the BetaKit Town Hall for Toronto Tech Week, Rodericks first joined The BetaKit Podcast to discuss his journey from government to social media, lessons learned from working at Twitter, and how a decentralized social media platform might one day help you find joy online.

Finding joy online is a weighty task, and Bluesky has already had its share of hiccups. On this episode, Rodericks explains that Bluesky briefly suspending and then unbanning the account of US Vice President JD Vance was “not the ideal outcome” before walking through the platform’s approach to content moderation.

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That approach includes automated tools, which Rodericks presented as a necessity to fight an internet filled with bots built to lie. The difficulty is that the “bad actors are evolving continually,” and new approaches to combat them only seem to make them stronger.

So is that what keeps Aaron Rodericks awake at night? Not really. The answer to that question is more closely tied to Bluesky’s approach to social media, which includes treating the company as a future adversary. 

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