# Social media was a detour from tech’s open foundations

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/social-media-was-a-detour-from-techs-open-foundations/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Camille François](https://realalpha.app/people/camille-francois/) · Camille François is a founding president of ROOST and professor at Columbia University.
- Host: [Reid Hoffman](https://realalpha.app/people/reid-hoffman/) · Co-founder, Manas AI · Co-founded LinkedIn; one of OpenAI's first investors; Greylock partner.
- Host: Aria Finger
- Show: Possible
- Episode: [Building safety tools no one can take away with ROOST’s Camille François](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/), Oct 7, 2026
- Moment: 8:17 to 11:17 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/social-media-was-a-detour-from-techs-open-foundations/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=497

## Quote

> “the way we built the foundation of tech around us is on **open protocol and on open source** software”
> — [Camille François](https://realalpha.app/people/camille-francois/) at [9:54](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=594) · Possible

## Takeaways

1. Social media’s centralized safety stack was a historical exception.
2. Open protocols and software supported earlier internet innovation.
3. Open tools can be audited, adapted and redistributed.

## About this segment

Camille François argues social media was an exception to the internet’s open-protocol history, leaving safety tools centralized and brittle. Shared foundations can restore access, scrutiny and adaptation.

From “Building safety tools no one can take away with ROOST’s Camille François”, Oct 7, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[8:22](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=502) And so I started thinking about, OK, well, let's try to figure out if those tools, everybody's sort of cobbling together, are they the same for everybody? Like, is it are we doing this because people have such unique needs? And so I started interviewing a lot of safety engineers across the field. And they were like, absolutely, they're the same. Most of the infrastructure is steady. So we did this project to sort of document what are the core components of safety infrastructure.

[8:48](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=528) We published a piece called the Dyer Framework that goes for detection, investigation, review, and enforcement. But really what engineers were telling us is, yeah, we get staffed on something. We built 30% of a workable thing. And then we get assigned to another project. And so everybody's sort of constantly rebuilding basic foundations, which is really frustrating. And so we said, OK, great. There's an opportunity to change the way we do safety in tech, to sort of rewire the way we do safety in tech.

[9:17](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=557) I feel like everyone's talking about there's a lot of other issues and discussions around AI. But a lot of people are seeing AI as sort of social media 2.0. We got social media. We were so excited. There were these harms, some of them to children, some about misinformation that we feel like we didn't sort of attack soon enough. and people are worried that it's going to happen with AI. Like, do you think that if ROOST had been around 10 years earlier, the landscape would be different?

[9:40](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=580) And like, where do we go from here? I actually think about social media as an exception to the rule of how we build tech, as a blip in the timeline. That's just a bizarre happenstance, right? Because if you take the long arc of tech, the way we built the internet, the way we built the foundation of tech around us is on open protocol and on open source software, right? TCPIP was an open protocol. Tim Berners-Lee donated the web to humanity, right?

[10:12](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=612) And so the reason why we can innovate and then keep tech relevant and keep tech responsive to our needs as a species is because we do this in the open. And then there's a sort of small era of social media where we kind of forget about all these lessons. And it's bizarre, but it's a fact that we've inherited all of the safety tech that we have from that blip in the timeline, from that era. That's why it's brittle.

[10:34](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=634) That's why it's hyper-centralized. That's why it's opaque. And so what we're doing with Roots, frankly, is sort of bringing back all those normal principles of how we build good tech into the world of safety. We're not really inventing something new rather than sort of like getting back to the roots of the internet. Exactly, right? Changing the approach to something we know works, which is, okay, if you want faster Ask collective innovation.

[10:59](https://realalpha.app/v/RQpx17UAK9M/?t=659) If you want people to have access to the tools they deserve, if you want people to trust the things that they run their lives on, give them good shared open source foundations. And do you think the leaders of the Frontier Labs are learning from any of those mistakes or like what mistakes are they still repeating?