Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has announced that he is funding research aimed at changing the way information circulates on social media.
Jack Dorsey who shared on his personal Twitter page that he would fund an independent team of five architects, engineers, and designers; dubbed Bluesky to develop an "open and decentralized standard for social media" with the goal of combating online violence, hate and disinformation.
According to the Twitter co-founder, he said the new standard will be open for adoption by fellow social media networks like Facebook or TikTok.
"We're facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet,"
"Centralized enforcement of the global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people," - Dorsey said.
Dorsey argued that the value of social media was increasingly shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms.
"Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t choose or build alternatives. Yet," he wrote.
An open standard, Dorsey said, would allow Twitter to focus on building recommendation algorithms that "promote healthy conversation."
He also said the team would also seek to "build open community" around the new standard, to include companies and organizations, researchers and civil society leaders.
"This isn't going to happen overnight," Dorsey conceded.
"It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralized 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."
