Juliet Shen is cofounder and Head of Product at ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), a nonprofit building open-source trust-and-safety infrastructure for platforms of every size. She has done anti-abuse product work at Google and Grindr, and was the first trust-and-safety product manager at Snap, where she helped launch early cross-platform efforts to combat child exploitation. ROOST's website is https://roost.tools.

Across her career, Juliet kept running into the same maddening pattern: every trust-and-safety team, at every platform, quietly rebuilding the same rules engines, review queues, and reporting pipelines from scratch, behind closed doors, and at enormous cost. ROOST is a bet that online safety should be shared, open infrastructure rather than proprietary secret sauce, available free to any platform or site that needs it. We talk about that, and a lot more.

Key Highlights:

• Every tech company shouldn't have to build their trust and safety tools from scratch behind closed doors. It’s an expensive waste of time when open-source infrastructure could solve the exact same foundational problems for everyone.
• PMs and engineers need to step up and lead in the trust and safety space. They are the ones who can actually bridge the gap and get policy, operations, engineering, and legal teams talking to each other.
• AI is great for knocking out the easy, baseline moderation tasks. But when a situation is highly nuanced or something the AI hasn't seen in its training data, you still absolutely need human judgment.
• As social media breaks apart into decentralized networks, a one-size-fits-all safety system won't work anymore. We need modular tools that let platforms look at who the user is, how they're behaving, and what they're posting as separate pieces of the puzzle.
• Good moderation is often less about analyzing the post itself and more about knowing exactly who is behind the account or the app. Right now, our lack of solid identity verification is a massive blind spot for digital safety.

Chapter Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

1:34 Career Journey and the Problem of Redundant Tool Building

5:30 The Role of Product Managers in Trust and Safety Teams

7:34 Impact of LLMs on Trust and Safety Operations

11:27 Focus Areas and Child Safety Priority

12:55 The ABC Framework and Actor Trust Challenges

16:54 Community Building and TrustCon Participation

19:13 Signal Sharing vs Tool Sharing Philosophy

22:43 Open Source Approach and Scaling Challenges

23:59 Future Roadmap and Research Partnerships

28:52 Reviewer Well-being and Mental Health Considerations

32:00 Centralized vs Decentralized Moderation Models

37:15 Government Role and Open Source Support

39:52 Success Metrics and Measurement Challenges

42:50 Standards, Testing, and Future Directions

Resources & Links:

Rob Leathern (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leathern/)

Juliet Shen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/julietshen/)

ROOST (https://roost.tools)