CDT Celebrates the Launch of the Open Source Tooling Initiative ROOST as a step towards Open and Collaborative Trust & Safety Investment

Trust & Safety teams need robust tools to keep users and communities safe online, but building these tools is often costly, time consuming, and requires technical expertise that not all platforms have. This is particularly so for small platforms, non-profit platforms, and those with decentralized infrastructure. Today at the AI Action Summit in Paris, the Robust Online Safety Tooling (ROOST) initiative is launching to address this challenge, by building and sharing open-source trust and safety tools. CDT will serve as a partner alongside a range of nonprofits and companies.

ROOST is an important step toward ensuring all online services, regardless of size or business model, have access to essential trust and safety tools. By building on the expertise of large online players and other open source projects, ROOST is creating a repository of open source and interoperable tooling to help online communities of all sizes flourish and keep spammy, illegal, and harmful content off their sites.

Today, many services face significant barriers to implementing reliable Trust & Safety infrastructure. All players benefit from having robust automated content moderation toolkits that include things like hash-matching tools that can detect and takedown known illegal content, classifiers that analyze text and apply content policies at scale, and rights-respecting signal sharing programs to share information about bad actors across platforms. Yet the current market for these tools does not sufficiently serve everyone, often because many tools are proprietary, closed source, or too expensive to access. Open source initiatives can help bridge this gap and ensure critical safety tools are available for all. Open source tools can also improve transparency of companies’ trust and safety practices, an important goal for securing user trust.

But meaningful Trust & Safety work needs collaboration. Making tooling open sourced and widely available makes the work of Trust & Safety easier, but not any less prone to error. Automated content analysis tools will continue to be prone to misunderstanding things like nuance, sarcasm, and context, all of which is found in abundance online everyday. Increasing the availability and therefore use of these technologies only makes it more urgent for us to have spaces for discussion and collaboration related to the use and operation of these tools.

Multistakeholder engagement examining these tools and the best practices for their deployment will strengthen this effort and improve their utility. Collaboration with civil society and subject matter experts helps ensure that content detection tools, their benefits and limitations are transparent, rights-respecting, and well-understood.

We welcome this dedicated effort to expand the availability and openness of trust & safety tooling— and look forward to working with ROOST and others in the ecosystem to meaningfully advance Trust & Safety tooling efforts in a participatory, rights-respecting way.