SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 12 — Twitter Inc plans to set up an independent research group to create an “open and decentralised standard” for social media networks, a model which the microblogging platform aspires to follow, Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said yesterday.
Centralised solutions are struggling to meet many new challenges faced by social networks, including large scale content moderation, Dorsey said, adding that the new standard will not be owned by any single private corporation.
“Centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people,” he tweeted.
Twitter Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal will be in charge of hiring a lead for the research team, called Bluesky, Dorsey said, while acknowledging that the project would take many years to complete.
Dorsey went on to explain how blockchain technology can provide a model for decentralising content hosting, oversight and even monetisation of social media.
“It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation ... ,” he said, detailing how the move would be beneficial for Twitter. — Reuters
