In recent years, Twitter has come under a lot of criticism for how it has handled certain issues, such as not doing enough to stop harassment on its platform and allowing foreign actions to escalate more political agenda. While the company has worked hard on its own by tweaking its tools, giving more options to users on what content they want to see, and even updating their guidelines several times. But it seems that things aren’t getting much better for the company and continues to get bashed.
Today, Twitter announced that it’s trying a different route where it’s asking people outside the company to help propose ways they can promote healthy, open and civil conversations on its platform and online in general.
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
Looking at the tweet above, we see Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey today tweet that the company isn’t proud of how some have taken advantage of its services. He specifically called out troll armies, misinformation campaigns and bots. He further added that Twitter has been accused of patchy, censorship and political bias as it has tried to fix problems it ran into and continued to run into.
“This is not who we are, or who we ever want to be,” he said. Dorsey says that the company still doesn’t now the best route to go about having healthy conversations on its platform and is now asking outside experts to chip in their advise. “Twitter’s health will be built and measured by how we help encourage more healthy debate, conversations and critical thinking; conversely, abuse, spam and manipulation will detract from it,” the company said today. “We are looking to partner with outside experts to help us identify how we measure the health of Twitter, keep us accountable to share our progress with the world and establish a way forward for the long-term.”
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
If you’re interested in proposing ways to help resolve Twitter’s issues, you can do so through this form starting today. The form will ask you to describe your proposed health metrics, how you’ll measure, evaluate and report them and how long you’ll need to completely develop your methods. In addition to you developing your proposed health metrics, it’s asking what resources you might need and asks you to provide any peer-reviewed articles you’ve published that could be relevant to your proposal. Those that are chosen to collaborate with Twitter will get funding from the company to develop and are expected to produce open-access, peer-reviewed research articles about their work.
If this sounds like something you want to pursue, you have until April 13th to submit your proposals. After that, Twitter will ask those it chooses to share further details throughout May and June. Final selections by Twitter will be announced in July.
