Twitter Is 'Rethinking' Its Service, and Suspending 1M Accounts Each Day (washingtonpost.com)

Twitter's CEO told the Washington Post he's "rethinking" core parts of Twitter: Dorsey said he was experimenting with features that would promote alternative viewpoints in Twitter's timeline to address misinformation and reduce "echo chambers." He also expressed openness to labeling bots -- automated accounts that sometimes pose as human users -- and redesigning key elements of the social network, including the "like" button and the way Twitter displays users' follower counts. "The most important thing that we can do is we look at the incentives that we're building into our product," Dorsey said. "Because they do express a point of view of what we want people to do -- and I don't think they are correct anymore."

Dorsey's openness to broad changes shows how Silicon Valley leaders are increasingly reexamining the most fundamental aspects of the technologies that have made these companies so powerful and profitable. At Facebook, for example, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has commissioned a full review of his company's products to emphasize safety and trust, from mobile payments to event listings.... In recent months, Twitter has made several changes to promote safety and trust. It has introduced new machine learning software to monitor account behavior and is suspending over a million problematic accounts a day.... Dorsey said Twitter hasn't changed its incentives, which were originally designed to nudge people to interact and keep them engaged, in the 12 years since Twitter was founded.

Comments

MAGA

[Anonymous Coward]

Ban conservatives right in time for the elections. Obvious politically motivated FANGS and li'l sidekicks are obvious.

Re: MAGA

[c6gunner]

Masterpiece Cakeshop clearly and flagrantly violated that law by refusing to bake a wedding cake for one couple, despite baking wedding cakes for dozens of others. His reason? Explicitly stated, he didn't want to serve a same-sex couple.

Bullshit. He told them he would be happy to serve them, but that he would not bake a cake specifically for a gay wedding. They could purchase whatever goods they wanted from the store, but they couldn't force him to create something which went against his beliefs.

That's why he lost in court, and even the most blatantly partisan members of the Supreme Court had to punt on the issue because they knew they were already going to be mocked for their tortuous claim about judicial bias in Colorado, so actually trying to pursue their facetious agenda would have just lead to them being compromised to the point of say, the Taney Court.

The supreme court didn't "punt on the issue"; they ruled in his favour.

Re:MAGA

[Anonymous Coward]

Watching FANG dismantle the network is amazing how short sighted their motivations are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Their *whole* business built on that very thing.

'everyone' used to shop at Sears right up until they didnt.

1) Jack is an asshole

[SensitiveMale]

2) The social media sites have always pushed a liberal agenda.
3) They are just more open and brazen about it now.
4) If someone thinks "Good. They should", don't get too comfortable. They'll be coming for you next. Always happens.

Re:Build a better bot detector

[snapsnap]

Underrated post. Their current system has way too many false positives.

"safety and trust"

[ooloorie]

In case you need a translation, "safety and trust" means "censoring viewpoints that don't agree with those of Silicon Valley's progressive billionaire class".

I do hope they get on with it, though: the more they censor, the more irrelevant and disliked they make themselves.