TED 2019: Jack Dorsey is the captain of Twittanic

Tuesday, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, has come to TED 2019 to answer his platform's faults. In his black hoodie and jeans, his neglected facial hair and his black cap, he was sitting with TED head Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers, who directs the day-to-day business of the conference, for a conversation that left the three members, as well as the public, frustrated.

"We are on this great trip with you aboard the Twittanic," said Anderson to Dorsey after about twenty minutes of interruption. "There are people in the management who say," We are worried about the upcoming iceberg! " And you say: "This is a good point" and "Our boat was not built to handle it" and we are waiting and showing you this extraordinary calm and we are all worried, but we say outside: & # 39; Jack, turn the fucking wheel! & # 39; "

Dorsey listened stoically to this comparison, like the meditative yogi that he often talks about aspiring to be. "It's democracy that is at stake! It's our culture that is at stake! It's our world at stake! Continued Anderson. "You play a brilliant listening role, Jack, but can you cope with the urgency and move on? Will you do that? "

"Yes, yes, yes," Dorsey replied, but then added, "We could do a lot of superficial things to solve the problem you're talking about, but we need to go further."

It has been more than a year since Dorsey made a public commitment to "fix" Twitter and determine what a platform looks like that promotes healthy discussion. Since then, he's been touring Mea Culpa, informing the world – and the regulators – that he knows that Twitter is broken, that it's poisonous and terrible and that he and his team are planning to rebuild it from radical way. He repeated all this on the TED scene, explaining that he wanted to rethink the behavior prompted by the site, for example, possibly removing the same button and putting less emphasis on the number of followers, while focusing on the interests of the news. He reiterated that he wanted to focus on optimizing the health of conversations and on the priority given to people spending their time learning on the site, rather than being scandalized or denied. To be harassed. He admitted that Twitter was full of problems, problems he had not anticipated 13 years ago when creating the site and that he is still trying to figure out how to solve them.

The urgency of this task would not have been clearer in the days leading up to Dorsey's appearance. Over the weekend, Ilhan Omar – a woman of color, an immigrant and a Muslim representing the state of Minnesota at the US House …reported an increase in death threats after President Trump tweeted a video resuming a speech that she recently delivered with images of the September 11 attacks. Many threats have been made on Twitter. On Monday, as Our Lady was burning, people had come to the platform to mourn the loss in real time, but also to spread lies and hatred as quickly as the flames had engulfed the spire of the cathedral . When Omar tweeted his own condolences, people responded with more death threats. Twitter was very much in itself, showing the power of its network as well as the danger.

Dorsey did not discuss any of these incidents specifically with TED. In fact, his answers lacked precision overall. When he was asked sharp questions, he avoided them, as he often does. Rodgers asked him how many people were working on content moderation on Twitter – a figure the company has never published, and Tuesday continued the wave of vagueness.

"It varies," Dorsey said. "We want to be flexible in this regard. No one can really do the same, which is why we have put so much effort into proactively eliminating abuse. "

This proactive work was the big news that Dorsey announced on the scene: a year ago, Twitter did not proactively monitor abuse using machine learning. at all. Instead, she relied entirely on human denunciations – a burden that Dorsey quickly recognized: he was unjustly placed on the victims of abuse. "We have made progress," he said. "Thirty-eight percent of abusive tweets are now proactively recognized by machine learning algorithms, but those that are recognized are still being examined by humans. But it was from zero percent just a year ago. While he uttered these words, Twitter sent a press release with More information on the effort, pointing out that three times more abusive accounts are suspended within 24 hours after being reported compared to that time last year.

These advances are good, but 38% is not much. Facebook's most recent transparency report, on the other hand, indicates that more than 51% of the content on which it acted for violating rules against hate speech was reported before users reported it. Dorsey or the official announcement on Twitter also did not provide many details on the operation of the technology for proactive detection of abuse.

The use of algorithms and automation will not solve all the problems of Twitter either. Facebook has announced a series of changes to better fight against misuse and misinformation, which it is not about to eradicate, despite all its technological sophistication. On Monday, YouTube briefly spotted the live video of Notre Dame's fire airing in newscasts with a link to information about the September 11th attacks – an automatic fact-checking effort that, in this case , showed how such systems can be imperfect.

For years, organizations such as Amnesty International have urged Twitter to be more transparent about abuses on its platform and the steps taken by the company to combat them. Rodgers noted that last year, a study conducted by Amnesty International revealed that a problematic or abusive tweet was sent to a woman every 30 seconds. For women of color, a tweet out of 10 that they receive is abusive.

In evoking the very real suffering of those present on his program, Rodgers and Anderson have tried to bring a sense of urgency to the conversation. But the laconic and extremely calm style of Dorsey's signature contradicted the tone they were trying to give. When Dorsey tried to point out how Twitter measures healthy conversations on the site – using four metrics developed by Cortico's MIT team – Anderson interrupted it.

"How difficult is it to get rid of Twitter's Nazis?" He asked.

Dorsey sighed. Deeply. He explained that the team had suppressed hate accounts and that she could see that an account was associated with a hate group they were banned from. "We are currently in a situation where this term is used quite loosely and we can not simply take any mention of that word accusing someone else as a factual indication that it should be removed from the platform, "he explained. Twitter, and Dorsey in particular, have long claimed that freedom of expression is a defining value for service.

The conversation was clearly frustrating for all three participants. "You did not let me finish," Dorsey said at one point, after being cut again. In this way, the TED event was also pretty meta: using Twitter is being frustrated by its promises and limits, by the amount of fire that drives it, while also being useful for modern life, by the obvious gravity of some of his problems. are seeing how seemingly elusive solutions can be.

Dorsey brought a specific solution. "The first thing you see when you go to [the page to report abuse] concerns the protection of intellectual property. You scroll down the list and you get abuse and harassment, "he said. "I do not know how it went in the company's history, but we put it above the thing that people want the most information on. Just our order shows the world what we think is important. We change all that, we order it in a good way. "

Despite his insistence on the overall picture, it was a very small problem to report for Dorsey, and a problem with a very obvious solution. Nevertheless, Twitter is not corrected. Why? Here the reasoning is terribly circular: because Dorsey says that he does not want to do a series of quick, iterative quick fixes; he wants to fundamentally rebuild the site to encourage better conversations, and it will take time – it is hard to say that the world can afford.

On the eve of Dorsey's appearance at TED, Carole Cadwalladr, the British journalist who told the story of the role played by Cambridge Analytica in the vote for Brexit, was held on the same stage and launched a challenge to all the "gods of Silicon Valley": Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Brin, Page and Dorsey are the last. "The technology you invented was incredible, but now it's a crime scene," she said. "My question is: is that what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As servants of authoritarianism around the world? You have decided to connect people and the same technology separates us now. "

Of these gods, only Dorsey is presented. But unlike an omniscient being, Dorsey does not have all the answers. He looks more like a ship captain, wondering aloud how to avoid the many icebergs that stand in his way while continuing to the front.

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