No, Twitter, Healthy Conversation Can't Be Engineered

Facebook's self-regulatory contortions in the wake of fake news and trolling scandals have gone on, with little visible effect, for months. Now Twitter founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has announced his company is going to try a different tack -- but Dorsey's approach is arguably even more far-fetched than his Facebook peer Mark Zuckerberg's: It's an attempt to view Twitter's social mess as an engineering problem.

In a Twitter thread on Thursday, Dorsey admitted that Twitter has been home to "abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns and increasingly divisive echo chambers" and that it's not proud of how it has dealt with them. So it would try to find a "holistic" solution through attempting to "measure the 'health' of conversation on Twitter." The metrics, designed in collaboration with outside experts, would presumably help redesign the service so that all the bad stuff would be gone without the need for censorship.