TED 2019: Twitter boss proposes to downgrade tastes and follow-ups

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey admitted again that much remains to be done to improve Twitter and reduce the amount of abuse and misinformation on the platform.

He added that the cabinet could downgrade tastes and pbadions, adding that with hindsight, he would not have designed the platform to showcase them.

He added that Twitter is currently inciting people to "publish a scandal".

Instead, he said that he should invite people to unite around topics and communities.

"It may be better if it becomes an interest-based network," he told TED Conservatives Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.

Rather than focusing on tracking individual accounts, users could be encouraged to follow hashtags, trends and communities.

This would require a systematic change that would represent a "huge change" for Twitter.

On the subject of abuse, he admitted that it was happening "on a large scale".

"We have witnessed harbadment, manipulation and misinformation – dynamics that we did not expect 13 years ago when we founded the company," he told Chris Anderson, TED curator.

"What worries me is how we approach them systematically."

He previously mentioned the role played by the likes and the following ones, designed to be important.

"One of the choices we made was to make the number of people following you grow and bold. If I started now with Twitter, I would not focus on the following and I would not create a liking.

"We have to watch how we display follows and likes," he added.

Pennington Rodgers asked her why, according to Amnesty, women of color were, on average, victims of abuse in one of the 10 tweets they published.

"It's a pretty awful situation," admitted Mr. Dorsey.

"The dynamics of the system makes it easy to harbad others."

He added that Twitter was increasingly using machine learning to detect abuse and said that 38% of abusive tweets were now identified by algorithms, then highlighted by humans, who decided to remove them from the platform. .

He also stated that the company was striving to facilitate the search for and simplify its policies on abuse.

When asked if he would show that it was urgent to solve the problems, he simply replied, "Yes".

Ask Jack

The TED audience was invited to join the conversation via the hashtag #askJackatTED, which received more than 1,000 questions within 10 minutes of the start of the speech.

One of the questions was posed by journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who spoke to TED on Monday and called on technology companies, including Twitter, to tackle directly the problem of misinformation widely shared on their platforms.

But in her question to Mr. Dorsey, she became interested in the abuses she suffered on Twitter.

"I would like to know why a video that shows that I am beaten and threatened with a gun for the soundtrack of the Russian anthem has remained in the air for 72 hours despite thousands of complaints ? " she wrote.

Mr. Dorsey did not answer that question, nor did he answer another question about how to deal with the large number of malicious robots displaying incorrect information.

He was also shown a graphic created by Zignal Labs, which showed the number of human tweets in relation to the tweets of suspicious bots evoking topics of the recent election campaign in Israel.

The bots seemed to dominate when it came to tweets about competitor Benny Gantz, who had been narrowly defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr. Dorsey was asked about this but did not answer.

Instead, he said the company was measuring the "conversational health" of the platform, using a number of metrics, including the degree of toxicity of the conversations and the number of people exposed to it. various opinions.

"We need to create a healthy contribution to the network and a healthy conversation, and on Twitter right now you do not necessarily lose the feeling of having learned something."