Aaron Rodericks loves his job, even if it isn’t for the faint of heart.
“I wouldn’t recommend my job to most people,” he said, laughing. “That would be the honest response.”
As Bluesky Social’s head of trust and safety, it’s up to Rodericks to keep one of the fastest growing social media platforms from becoming a playground for trolls, misinformation and election interference.
“The best part about working in trust and safety is you have no idea what you’re going to be dealing with,” Rodericks said in an interview from his home office in Dublin. “The challenges are that there are so many problems that can arise from moment to moment.”
Last week, Rodericks himself became a target for attacks on his own platform, including messages from accounts set up with names like “Fire Aaron Rodericks.”
“People love to disagree with moderation decisions,” he said. “It’s a common occurrence.”
Overseeing a social media platform that has grown from 5 million users to more than 25 million in ten months is about as far as you can get from Rodericks’ former career as a federal public servant.
Born in Mumbai, India, Rodericks and his family came to Canada when he was a child — first to Toronto, then to Montreal’s West Island and finally to the Ottawa suburb of Stittsville. After earning a bachelor’s degree in public affairs and policy management at Carleton University, Rodericks followed in his father’s footsteps and began working for the federal government.
Over 13 years, he worked for several departments, including Immigration, Global Affairs and Treasury Board, often in jobs that involved innovation or the online world. In 2019, a job opportunity for his wife prompted him to leave government and move to Ireland.
Rodericks soon landed at Twitter in May 2019 as co-lead of its trust and safety section, working on disrupting threats on the platform such as election interference, misinformation and disinformation.
Rodericks describes his job at Twitter as “a great experience.”
“It was fantastic to have my first experience working in tech, just seeing the vast difference in speed, in product, in how rapidly we could move,” he said. “I’ve certainly spent, in one case, four years trying to get a briefing note through leadership in government to try and get it approved, and no one knew if they had the right authority.
“It was just so staggering to be in these different environments where perfect was the enemy of good. While in government, you were always trying to achieve perfect but you were trying to do it before launch. And then after you launched it, it was done. You never touched it again.
“Meanwhile, at Twitter, you launched your best effort. You threw intelligent people at the problem. You saw how they handled it.”
After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2023 and rebranded it as X, he fired many of its employees, including Rodericks.
In February, Rodericks started at Bluesky, part of a staff of about 20 working remotely in different countries.
Rodericks said being Canadian helps him in his job.
“I think the Canadian side of me has also given me a different perspective on speech, and things like peace, order and good government also embed themselves in my thinking when I’m looking to apply trust and safety from a principles and policy perspective,” he said.
“I try to balance those as opposed to veering towards complete free speech for everyone all the time, or trying to be too restrictive.”
Rodericks said being Canadian also means that he thinks “as a soft power.”
“I’m always thinking of the little guy,” he said. “When I worked in Twitter, I was always thinking of what are the impacts on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities? What are those impacts on countries?”
Aaron Rodericks, head of trust and safety for Bluesky Social and former co-lead of election integrity for Twitter, says the threat of foreign election interference online has evolved in recent years and promises to be even more complex in the next federal election.
For example, election interference in one country can lead to far more violence and harm on the ground than in other countries, he said.
Rodericks said his experience in the federal public service, with its focus on neutrality and impartiality, also played a role in his work at Twitter and Bluesky.
“It (also) made me quite talented at briefings, of all things, at Twitter, when I was trying to distil a complicated emerging issue down to a couple of points and get leadership to make a decision on the issue,” he said.
He said it also helps him deal with governments.
“I understand the perspective that they’re coming from,” he said. “Governments don’t tend to like things they don’t understand or they don’t know. So frequently, you just have to give them an understanding of the context, the issue.”
While Bluesky doesn’t yet have some of the problems that plague X, Rodericks sees signs of bad actors and spam networks trying to establish footholds.
Rodericks said Canada has experienced fewer attempts at election interference than many other countries. But he also warns the threats are becoming more complex and harder to detect. In the past, the interference came from Russians hired to disrupt elections with social media posts, or from proxy actors on the ground posting messages.
Now, he said, the emerging threat facing Canada’s next election comes from influencers paid under the table by foreign governments through disguise proxies. He cited the allegations in the United States case involving Tenet Media.
“By the time the influencer starts sending messages that happen to be aligned with their foreign actor … there’s so much deniability and cutouts through the realm that it’s just very hard to trace back,” Rodericks said. “It’s very hard to detect these days.
“These are the types of things that I would be really concerned about in this election and others moving forward.”