Twitter boss Jack Dorsey funds research to fight online hate and misinformation by changing how social media works
- Jack Dorsey is backing Bluesky project to develop an ‘open and decentralised standard for social media’ that Facebook, Instagram and others can adopt
- New standard would detect violent content and disinformation and wrest control away from proprietary algorithms
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is funding research aimed at changing the way information circulates on social media – with the goal of combating online violence, hate and disinformation.
Dorsey announced this week that he would fund an independent team of five architects, engineers and designers – dubbed Bluesky – to develop an “open and decentralised standard for social media”.
“We’re facing entirely new challenges centralised solutions are struggling to meet,” Dorsey said. Those range from rooting out disinformation and detecting violent content – hate speech or child pornography – to the fact today’s algorithms tend to direct users’ toward content “that sparks controversy and outrage”.
“Centralised 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,” Dorsey said. But he argues a single technical standard shared across different platforms – which currently operate like walled gardens – could be a game changer.
A shared new standard could curb the power of tech giants to determine what content goes viral – putting individual users in control. It could also theoretically hand users back control of their data – currently stored and monetised by private platforms, typically through advertising.