As a Twitter user now of over a decade, the platform and how it is run is something that interests me tremendously and, as a consequence, what the CEO of the company @jack has to say about it matters a lot. Unfortunately, most interviews of Jack wind up being done from a perspective of the business (how do they intend to compete with Facebook) or the political aspects of it.
I’ve been a listener of Sam Harris‘ podcasts for a while now. They are long, ruminative and opinionated in a manner that makes you want to find out more as a means to making yourself better informed. Which also means that there is much to disagree with Sam; while agreeing with and learning a lot from other parts of what he says. And his podcast with Jack Dorsey (or, ‘interview’ as the old timers like me would call it), is a one of the best I have heard on Twitter. Strangely, Sam says at the beginning of the podcast that he thinks it could have been a lot better and I do disagree with him there.
The conversation shines a light on some of the mysterious aspects of Twitter, the most controversial of which is shadow-banning, which all sides of a divide in an argument believes to be biased against them. In the interview, Jack elaborates a bit on that specific action and clarifies that doing that to someone is the outcome of a series collection of actions made by the offending account rather than it being a case of a solitary action that resulted in the shadow-ban.
There is a also a fair bit of time spent on acknowledging how these platforms help create the dangerous filter bubbles and how they do not yet have the means to fix it.
I don’t really think that we can fix filter bubbles with existing technology. Particularly, because the tech often tries to mimic what we do otherwise; just that it does the filtering far more efficiently than we can accomplish on our own.
Listen to the entire episode for quite an interesting conversation.
The Best Jack Dorsey Interview
