Published 18:58 IST, January 17th 2020
Twitter CEO seeks suggestion from Elon Musk, Tesla founder replies
Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested his Twitter Inc. counterpart Jack Dorsey come up with a mechanism where one is able to differentiate between real and fake users.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey held a teleconference with Tesla founder Elon Musk in front of thousands of his employees and sought suggestions on improving the social media platform. Tesla CEO suggested Dorsey find a mechanism where one is able to differentiate between real and fake users. In a video posted by a Twitter employee, Musk said that there should be a way to identify bots and able to identify whether the user is authentic or part of “troll army”.
The Tesla CEO wanted to know whether the feedback, in the form of replies and Twitter trends, is real or someone is trying to manipulate the system. Musk has been at the receiving end of relentless trolling, especially from one of the groups that criticise the SpaceX founder with the hashtag “TSLAQ”.
Musk's controversial tweets
Musk is known for his controversial comments on social media platforms and recently landed in a soup for calling British caver Vernon Unsworth a “pedo guy”. Unsworth filed a defamation suit and Musk is currently facing the trial. In a court declaration, Musk said that the term “pedo guy” was a common insult in South Africa while growing up and was synonymous with ‘creepy old man’.
Twitter reforms
Twitter has been working on a slew of reforms and recently it stopped accepting political advertisements. In a series of tweets, Dorsey said that internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers but similar power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
“Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale,” tweeted Dorsey while making the announcement.
Twitter is also planning to fund a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.
18:58 IST, January 17th 2020