Twitter pledges to do better

Today, Twitter pledged to be better at handling abuse, and dealing with bad actors on the platform. You're probably wondering if you've read this before, and you have. Over and over again, Twitter has pledged and pledged and pledged to do better, and hey, we're getting a new pledge today.

Jack Dorsey, in a long-winded series of tweets yesterday, said that the company is not "proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough" and will "hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress."

This time, it might be different, if it's genuine: Twitter doesn't want to solve this alone, and has asked for community help to define a way to clean things up

The company plans to work with outside help to define criteria, and measure platform wellbeing at scale — an idea that has legs, and moves beyond just optimizing for maximum time spent on the platform.

Instead of defining Twitter's success metrics around monthly active users and minutes spent, the company hopes to focus on overall sentiment based on shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion and receptivity as defined by non-profit AI lab Cortico

To get there, Twitter opened a request for proposal and wants groups to work with Twitter's team directly, with unfettered data access to find a solution, and funding for their research. 

I think it's difficult to do any sort of conversational health work like this on a platform that's funded by automated advertising. The discourse on Twitter is definitely influenced by those ads, and that's not going to change either. 

Like others have said, I find myself now stuck in perpetual prove it mode with Twitter. This is a company that's extremely good at saying things, but very bad at execution — to the point that it's hard to know whether it'll do anything at all about it beyond here.

We'll hear about the first projects in July, supposedly.


Tab Dump

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