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Twitter backs overhaul of social media to stem disinformation
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 12, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is funding
research aimed at changing the way information circulates on social media — with
the goal of combating online violence, hate and disinformation.
Dorsey on Tuesday announced he would fund an independent team of five architects,
engineers, and designers — dubbed Bluesky — to develop an “open and
decentralized standard for social media.”
In a series of posts, he explained the goal is for Twitter to ultimately be
subject to this new standard, which would be open to adoption by fellow social
media networks like Facebook or TikTok.
“We’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to
meet,” Dorsey said.
Those range from rooting out disinformation and detecting violent content — hate
speech or child pornography — to the fact today’s algorithms tend to direct
users’ toward content “that sparks controversy and outrage.”
“Centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading
information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much
burden on people,” Dorsey said.
But he argues a single technical standard shared across different platforms —
which currently operate like walled gardens — could be a game changer.
A shared new standard could curb the power of tech giants to determine what
content goes viral — putting individual users in control.
It could also theoretically hand users back control of their data — currently
stored and monetized by private platforms, typically through advertising.
Dorsey argued that the value of social media was increasingly shifting away from
content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms.
“Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t choose
or build alternatives. Yet,” he wrote.
An open standard, Dorsey said, would allow Twitter to focus on building
recommendation algorithms that “promote healthy conversation.”
He also said the team would also seek to “build open community” around the new
standard, to include companies and organizations, researchers and civil society
leaders.
“This isn’t going to happen overnight,” Dorsey conceded.
“It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralized
standard for social media that paves the path to solving the challenges listed
above. Our commitment is to fund this work to that point and beyond.”
BSS/AFP/AU/07:45 hrs