Jack Dorsey defends Twitter’s anti-abuse AI during heated TED exchange
At TED, the Twitter cofounder says algorithms can help solve the platform’s problems with abuse and misinformation, but not everyone’s convinced.
Jack Dorsey knows his platform is flawed. “It’s a pretty terrible situation when you’re coming to a service to learn something about the world, and you spend the majority of time reporting and receiving abuse,” the Twitter cofounder said on the stage at TED in Vancouver, during a conversation with the head of TED, Chris Anderson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers, TED’s current affairs curator. Dorsey was referencing the fact that a woman is abused on Twitter every 30 seconds, or that the platform, through the proliferation of bots on it, has been accused of influencing elections in the U.S. and most recently, in Israel, or allowing toxic accounts linked with extremist groups to linger.