Twitter shares rise; CEO questions the health of Twitter conversations
Twitter shares closed higher in the US Thursday, as its CEO asked for help discovering how healthy conversations on the platform are. He also acknowledged that too much abuse and negative commentary has been published on Twitter and the it hasn’t been addressed quickly enough.
Twitter shares closed 1.19% higher at $32.24, proving an outlier amid broader US index declines.
Twitter promotes ‘healthy’ conversations
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Thursday published a series of tweets questioning the health of conversations on Twitter and acknowledging the abuse present on the social media platform. The business has also asked for proposals from ‘outside experts’ to help it measure the health of Twitter coversations.
“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” Dorsey tweeted. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”
“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,” Dorsey added.
Research proposal submissions
In order to understand how to better measure what a ‘healthy’ conversation on Twitter is, the tech firm has requested assistance from outside its business.
The social media platform has already been working with non-profit research firm Cortico, who have come up with four indicators to measure conversational health. But Twitter wants more research and help to better measure how ‘healthy’ it’s user’s conversations are.
“We don’t have all of the answers and cannot do this alone, but know that the outcome will be stronger when we look to experts around the world for counsel and support,” Twitter said.
Twitter’s interest in the health of conversations on its platform, follows close after Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also raised this as a key issue for his tech firm in 2018.
