Twitter intends to make its content moderation practices more transparent: Jack Dorsey

PTI, Feb 26, 2021, 12:00 PM IST

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New Delhi:  Twitter has said that social media entities are facing a “significant trust deficit” and pledged to make its content moderation practices more transparent, giving people more control as it strives to be among the most open companies globally.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the microblogging platform is making a lot of progress in its accountability by “owning our mistakes and correcting, and reliability by following published principles and not wavering”.

“We are lacking in transparency and giving people more choice and control,” he told analysts.

Dorsey said that Twitter intends to make its content moderation practices more transparent, give people more control to moderate their interactions, enable a marketplace approach to relevance algorithms, and fund an open-source social media standard.

“… We agree many people don’t trust us. Never has this been more pronounced than the last few years… And we aren’t alone: every institution is experiencing a significant trust deficit,” he said.

Focussing on metrics like transparency, accountability, reliability, and choice will have a huge impact, Dorsey noted.

The comments come at a time when issues ranging from provocative posts to misinformation and from data breaches to privacy issues have placed social media companies including Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp on the line of fire in India, and other markets.

On Thursday, India announced sweeping regulations for social media firms as well as OTT (over the top) players requiring them to remove any inflammatory content flagged by authorities within 36 hours and setting up a complaint redressal mechanism with an officer being based in the country.

The guidelines also make it mandatory for platforms such as Twitter and WhatsApp to identify the originator of a message that authorities consider to be anti-national and against the security and sovereignty of the country.

The norms on social media come within weeks of a spat between the government and Twitter over certain messages around farmer protests that the government saw as inciting violence. The government sought removal of about 1,500 accounts and messages, a request that Twitter complied with, only after being warned of penal action.

While the company doesn’t disclose country-specific user numbers, government data put the microblogging platform’s user base at 1.75 crores.

Dorsey also talked about working on doubling Twitter’s development velocity by the end of 2023, resulting in doubling the number of features per employee that directly drive either mDAU (monetizable daily active users) or revenue.

“We have a goal of at least 315 million mDAU in the fourth quarter of 2023, which requires continued compounding growth at about 20 percent per year from the base of 152 million mDAU we reported in the fourth quarter of 2019,” he added.

The company also aims to more than double its total annual revenue to over USD 7.5 billion in 2023.

“This requires us to gain market share with performance ads, grow brand advertising, and expand our products to small and medium-sized businesses throughout the world,” Dorsey said.