Twitter CEO wants to make the social platform a more “civil” space
[Photo by: Twitter]
Twitter, like many other social networking sites, has been under fire this past year for things such as the spread of misinformation, the rising number of bots and a growing number of harassment or abuse between users.
Now, the CEO of Twitter is stepping forward to say that it can't fix these problems by themselves.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted a series of tweets asking for users to “help increase the collective health, openness and civility of public conversation” on the popular social networking site. In his tweets, Dorsey admits that the company hasn't always been the best at maintaining an open and civil environment on the website, saying: “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”
We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.
— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018
According to Dorsey, Twitter didn't look at, or predict, the negative real-world impact that comes from public conversation. After witnessing things such as “abuse,” “troll armies” and “manipulation through bots,” Dorsey says that he isn't proud of how the company has handled these types of situations. While working on fixing these problems, Dorsey says that “we‘ve been accused of apathy, censorship, political bias and optimizing for our business and share price instead of the concerns of society.”
Finishing his thoughts, Dorsey says “this is not who we are, or who we ever want to be.”
In order to create a more positive and open environment for its users, Dorsey is calling for help.
In a blog post by the service, the company believes that by measuring its contribution to the overall health of the conversations on the site, it can then see what its impact on the world will be in the future. In doing so, the company wants to encourage healthy debate and conversations while minimizing things such as spam or manipulation.
Twitter is also looking to partner with experts outside of the website to help them measure the health of Twitter, to share its progress and to keep the popular site accountable for the things that it is doing.
The company is now accepting proposals on ways to measure the healthiness of conversations on the website in order to improve it. Users have until April 13 to submit a proposal form.
Once the forms have been selected and those applicants have explained further details on their proposals, the company plans to announce the first projects sometime in July.
