Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey went on a massive Twitter thread to announce that the company is looking for solutions its troll problem. He acknowledges the problem that the company has but seems to be out of solutions for how to solve the problem.
Dorsey assures users that Twitter is working on fixing the problem.
Troll Armies
During his long Twitter thread, Dorsey manages to talk about all the problems that Twitter is facing. He said the company is working on solutions in measuring conversational health, and Twitter is open up to solutions.
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
Just like Facebook, Twitter had a problem with fake accounts spreading disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. It has been removing accounts and has been having problems with its reporting system. Dorsey doesn't get into any specifics regarding any sort of policy changes that Twitter would make in the future, instead of throwing bait at users, hoping a solution comes along on its own.
He does say that those who wish harm upon others have learned to play the Twitter system in order to say whatever they want to say.
"We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers," said Dorsey in his long Twitter thread. "We aren't proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough."
Conversational Health
Dorsey does go into the conversational health of Twitter. He wonders if it could be measured to see what changes can be made to the system. Going even further, he points out a new concept of measuring the health of a conversation.
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
The way that the concept measures the health of a conversation is through four principles: shared attention, shared reality, variety, and receptivity.
He indicates that Twitter needs to make changes in order to better gauge the conversations taking place on the social media website. Even going as far as asking for people to apply for jobs to help out with the changes.
In the article about conversational health, it shows that social media may actually be dividing us more than uniting us.
"For all their benefits, social media have also contributed to certain ailments of public discourse: balkanization, sustained isolation of socio-political tribes, failure to entertain other points of view, distortion of others' views, etc.," says Cortico, which came up with the indicators that Dorsey pointed out. "It's clear now that these and other ailments encourage growing extremism of opinions and dehumanization of individuals and groups. Extremism and hostility towards others are not new, but are sometimes being amplified and accelerated by social media."
Cortico's plan is to study the four indicators that it has developed and work with social media companies to better understand how people are interacting with one another. They do say that this is still a working model that will need to be more developed as more research goes into it.
