As a founding partner, Project Liberty Institute championed the announcement of ROOST in Paris. Check out a video of Audrey Tang, Project Liberty Senior Fellow, speaking with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, about what happens when the vertical race to build AI merges with the horizontal race to make those systems as safe and ethical as possible.
If ROOST is successful, we might look back on this moment as a turning point in the effort to build a better, more pluralistic online environment, safer for kids and global Internet users alike.
To some tech industry experts and skeptics like Casey Newton, ROOST is a long-overdue idea that could succeed by doing what has driven internet innovation for years: leveraging open-source tools to build the next generation of online safety infrastructure for the age of AI.
In this newsletter, we’ll explore ROOST and how open-source tools and digital infrastructure will drive the next generation of the web. When foundational technology is open and accessible, the internet becomes safer, more resilient, more democratic, and more human.
// What is ROOST?
ROOST, which was officially announced this month, is a multi-organization initiative that develops, maintains, and distributes open source building blocks and tools that safeguard users and communities.
It has received the backing and funding from a group of leading partners (of which Project Liberty Institute is a founding member, along with companies like Google, OpenAI, Roblox, Discord, and others) to source, build, and distribute three types of tools:
- Tools to identify, remove, and report CSAM. Google’s Content Safety API that detects CSAM could be integrated, for example.
- Tools and classifiers that can identify harms in various mediums. Roblox has already contributed an open-source model for detecting abuse, racism, and sexual content in audio clips.
- Tools that help content moderators do their job better. Examples include consoles that can help content moderators quickly review posts and wellness features that reduce the heavy mental health burden of content moderation work.
ROOST will also build a community of practice for developers and provide hands-on support for companies with varying approaches to online safety.
// Why is ROOST needed?
ROOST makes accessible and public online safety tools that have been developed privately for years by the biggest tech companies.
“When we interviewed trust and safety engineers and product managers for this project, most shared their frustration with having to build crucial safety tools from scratch at every company, as there are no reliable open source components to start from,” said Juliet Shen, a former product leader at Snap, Grindr, and Google who is now ROOST’s head of product.
Clint Smith, the chief legal officer at Discord, has seen something similar. “The things we needed to build had already been built by Snap, Reddit, and other companies,” he said. “But all of them were proprietary implementations done by those companies’ engineering teams. We asked ourselves, ‘Why can’t we have a common set of tools?’”
ROOST focuses on high-quality, open versions of core tools that immediately add value and avoid unnecessary duplication. It’s building accessible tools that can become the industry standard, used by both tech giants and emerging players.
Last year, we dedicated a newsletter to explore five insights from Trust & Safety expert Eli Sugarman. It highlighted the complexities, nuances, and opportunities around Trust & Safety and content moderation. One of Sugarman’s recommendations was to build and maintain open source tools, something he is now doing as the Vice Chair of the ROOST board.
His perspective on how to build open online safety is also reflected in ROOST’s unique approach: It doesn’t prescribe a one-size-fits-all set of guidelines or rules around content moderation and online safety. Instead, it’s focused on creating and distributing tools and digital infrastructure. It’s up to the companies that adopt those tools to determine how they’re used and what policies they enable.
// The power of open source innovation
The concept behind ROOST is not new. It follows a proven trajectory of how the internet advances.
- First, companies build tools from scratch, where everyone creates proprietary versions of the same tools with the same functionality.
- Second, open-source tools establish a new baseline of digital infrastructure that anyone can use.
- Third, open-source infrastructure becomes the seedbed for innovations, more public tools, and better tech.
Take cybersecurity. In the 1980s and 1990s, many companies built their security solutions themselves. But by the 1990s, the Linux operating system came along, creating an open-source system that companies could adopt and customize, all for free.
Creating open-source digital infrastructure like Linux spurred innovations. New cybersecurity tools emerged like Snort (detecting network intrusions) and OpenSSL (encrypting data in transit). Today, Snort and OpenSSL still serve as core cybersecurity infrastructure. For more, check out the history of the open-source software movement.
// The promise of better digital infrastructure
Building accessible digital infrastructure is central to Project Liberty’s mission. Open source technology not only democratizes access and decentralizes power, but it also creates the nurturing conditions for innovation and collaboration—principles captured in the original spirit of the internet.
The stakes in online safety and protecting the internet’s youngest users couldn’t be higher. Open source technology and decentralized innovation can ensure we keep pace in the data and AI age.
As François said, “After a year of conversations with smaller platforms, decentralized services, open source developers and technology innovators of all stripes, one thing became clear: the systems underpinning online safety have become some of the most centralized, gate-kept and fragile features of our digital landscape. ROOST exists to ensure safety becomes a space for collaborative innovation rather than a barrier to entry.”
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