How AI Is Rewriting the Future of Trust and Safety with Yoel Roth

"The word I always come back to when I think of the future of trust and safety is governance. We are no longer just making moderation decisions. We're no longer just banning people or deleting posts or removing accounts. We are ultimately responsible for overseeing the health of the platforms and communities that we've created. Especially in an age of AI, I think there's a huge role for the field of trust and safety in overseeing the decisions that AI makes. In a world where we automate more of our decisions, that doesn't mean that we don't have jobs anymore. It means that our jobs change. And our jobs change to being auditors and overseers of automated decisions. And then when we find problems, we're the people who are now responsible for engineering solutions to them." - Yoel Roth

Fresh out of the studio, Yoel Roth, Senior Vice President and Head of Trust and Safety at Match Group, joins Bernard Leong to trace how trust and safety has evolved from a behind-the-scenes function into a board-level discipline. Drawing on his earlier work in Twitter (now known as X) and his current work across the different portfolio companies under Match Group: Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid, Yoel reframes online fraud as an economics problem — why a new face costs scammers more than a new SIM card. He unpacks why anonymity does not cause online abuse, compares the American, European, and Chinese regulatory models, and argues trust and safety belongs alongside customer acquisition cost (CAC) as a growth lever. The future, he closes with what great would look like, is governance — AI shifting practitioners from moderators to auditors.

Episode Highlights
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Yoel Roth from Match Group
[01:13] Introduction: Yoel Roth from Match Group
[04:30] Content moderation as governance, not just policy
[06:30] A front-row seat to platform governance debates
[09:00] Protecting public-facing employees from threats
[10:30] First shift in trust and safety: regulation goes global
[11:30] Shift: from reactive to proactive
[14:30] 98% of Match Group's revenue depends on safety
[16:30] Tinder Face Check and the case for friction
[18:00] Biggest mistakes in building trust and safety
[23:30] Why scammers target dating platforms specifically
[26:00] A new face costs more than a new SIM
[30:30] AI as decision enablement, not replacement
[34:00] Detection plus intervention against AI deepfakes
[38:00] Three regulatory regimes shaping the internet
[40:00] What regulators misunderstand about dating apps
[44:30] Why the future of trust and safety is governance
[47:30] Spencer Rascoff and the CAC reframe
[49:00] Resilience and mission in trust and safety work
[51:30] Closing

Profile: Yoel Roth, Senior Vice President, Trust & Safety, Match Group

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoelroth/

Personal Website: https://yoyoel.com/

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.