As someone who believes that effective content moderation is a prerequisite for building good social products and promoting actual free expression, I’ve been depressed by platforms’ reactionary turn away from building them. But then last week, I learned of an initiative that might actually begin to reverse this slide — and some big platforms are actually supporting it. It’s called ROOST — that stands for robust open online safety tools — and it launched at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris today with $27 million in funding from Google, OpenAI, Discord, Roblox and others. It’s a bid to revolutionize trust and safety with open-source tools in the same way that cybersecurity was similarly transformed in the 1980s and 90s — and the commitments it has received from platforms to date suggest that it could well succeed. https://www.platformer.ne..