Social media in particular has helped centralize and expand the reach of some of the web’s darkest horrors, from terrorist recruitment to horrific hate speech and threats of violence. Meanwhile, the unseen hand of the social media platforms themselves is silently shaping that discourse, from who is allowed to speak to what they are permitted to say. Into this dark and foreboding world comes Twitter’s proposed new floodlight of civility, the idea that we can simply instrument our online world with a set of metrics that assess its “health,” create a dashboard of our online “conversational health” and then drive the platform towards the green zone on the dials. If pushing the world towards greater conversational overlap becomes a focus, how precisely do we do that? Does this new initiative show that Twitter has finally recognized that it alone may not have all of the answers to how to fix its platform?

Source: Forbes March 04, 2018 02:37 UTC