Twitter CEO asks for help fixing 'civility' on Twitter

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is asking for help improving the openness and civility of conversation on Twitter, saying the company failed to prevent misinformation, echo chambers and abuse of its global messaging service.

In a series of tweets , Dorsey says Twitter needs to re-engineer the service to encourage more healthy debate and critical thinking. The company is now soliciting proposals for measuring the healthiness of conversation on the service in order to improve it.

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

Why? We love instant, public, global messaging and conversation. It’s what Twitter is and it’s why we‘re here. But we didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences. We acknowledge that now, and are determined to find holistic and fair solutions.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

While working to fix it, we‘ve been accused of apathy, censorship, political bias, and optimizing for our business and share price instead of the concerns of society. This is not who we are, or who we ever want to be.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

We’ve focused most of our efforts on removing content against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking. This is the approach we now need.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

Recently we were asked a simple question: could we measure the “health” of conversation on Twitter? This felt immediately tangible as it spoke to understanding a holistic system rather than just the problematic parts.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

If you want to improve something, you have to be able to measure it. The human body has a number of indicators of overall health, some very simple, like internal temperature. We know how to measure it, and we know some methods to bring it back in balance.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

Our friends at @cortico and @socialmachines introduced us to the concept of measuring conversational health. They came up with four indicators: shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion, and receptivity. Read about their work here: https://t.co/A12ZrACs8Z

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

We don’t yet know if those are the right indicators of conversation health for Twitter. And we don’t yet know how best to measure them, or the best ways to help people increase individual, community, and ultimately, global public health.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

What we know is we must commit to a rigorous and independently vetted set of metrics to measure the health of public conversation on Twitter. And we must commit to sharing our results publicly to benefit all who serve the public conversation.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

We simply can’t and don’t want to do this alone. So we’re seeking help by opening up an RFP process to cast the widest net possible for great ideas and implementations. This will take time, and we’re committed to providing all the necessary resources. RFP: https://t.co/SFb3e8joLl

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

We’re going to get a lot of feedback on this thread and these ideas, and we intend to work fast to learn from and share the ongoing conversations. @Vijaya, @mrdonut and I will do a Periscope next week to share more details and answer questions.

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

Thanks for taking the time to read and consider, and also, come help us: https://t.co/KzlFJWLMjX

— jack (@jack) March 1, 2018

In January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he would devote 2018 to fixing similar problems at Facebook.

In a related development, YouTube says its effort to crack down on misinformation with more human moderators has hit some snags, acknowledging mistakes were made in deleting some channels in the wake of the Florida school shooting.