Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey has said the company will fund independent research into “open and decentralised” models for social media networks.

The project, named Blue Sky, will involve an independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers and designers to develop an open standard for social media, which Dorsey said will have the goal of tackling online abuse and fake news.

In a Twitter thread, Dorsey said the standard - which Twitter ultimately hopes to adopt as a client of the independent, decentralised system - would take years to develop, but would help to meet a range of policy challenges that individual companies are struggling to resolve on their own.

“We’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet,” Dorsey wrote.

“For instance, 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,” he explained, citing the criticism frequently levelled at social media firms for failing to crack down on hate speech and misleading content.

Dorsey said the value of social media was now “shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention”.

However, he said that the algorithms used for these functions are usually proprietary, meaning that alternatives with different standards, models and preferences are not easily built.

The new standard, he suggested, would enable users to use a variety of services to access networks - such as Twitter and Facebook - which could act as ‘filters’ for the content seen, enabling greater decentralised responsibility for policing platforms to third parties and to individuals themselves.

Dorsey said Twitter hoped that a new standard will lead to more targeted online conversation which “informs and promotes health” rather than “conversation that sparks controversy and outrage”.

He insisted that the Blue Sky team, led by Twitter’s chief technology officer Parag Agrawal, would operate independently from the direction of Twitter, and that the resulting standard would not be “owned by any single private corporation, furthering the open and decentralised principles of the internet”.

Dorsey added that a range of new technologies, such as blockchain, had demonstrated the viability of a decentralised approach to social media hosting, governance and monetisation.

However, he added: “It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralised standard for social media that paves the path to solving the challenges listed above – our commitment is to fund this work to that point and beyond.”

Share Story: