Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey envisions a future where you can choose what you see on social media, choosing your favorite recommendation algorithm, rather than relying on a single parent company to do exactly the right thing.
In a liaison with investors today, Dorsey expanded his vision of how a decentralized social network can work – and why Twitter would want to create a network that is beyond his or any other company’s control. Dorsey said that Twitter would benefit from having access to “a much larger corpus of conversations”, from which it can bring up relevant content for users. “This is where we will be competitive,” he said.
Dorsey said that Twitter is “excited to build” resources that will give people more options about what they see. “You can imagine a vision similar to that of an app store of ranking algorithms that give people maximum flexibility in terms of” what posts are placed in front of them, Dorsey said in the call.
Twitter could create its own ranking algorithms for people to choose and offer a “market” where people select different options. “This is something that not only can we host, but we can participate,” he said. Giving people more options “would not only help business, but it would get more people to participate in social media in the first place,” he said.
Dorsey also sees decentralization as a way to “solve some of the problems” around Section 230, the law that gives platforms protection from user-created content. The law has recently been a popular target for some lawmakers, and a decentralized network can offer Twitter a way to avoid problems if stricter rules are put in place, whether those rules require more moderation or for Twitter to apply a more neutral approach to what content is displayed.
Twitter has been slowly working on developing a decentralized social network for over a year. Dorsey announced the project, called Bluesky, in December 2019, but the company is trying to hire a project manager – so things are clearly distant. TechCrunch published a deep dive last month on where the project is headed and described Bluesky as “firmly in the research phase”.
There are already decentralized social networks, although none have been very successful (remember Mastodon?). Twitter said that Bluesky’s team may choose to work with an existing decentralized system or may end up building a new one if the team thinks this is the best approach.