Twitter...

Twitter boss offers to demote likes and follows

By Jane Wakefield

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has again admitted there is much work to do to improve Twitter and cut down on the amount of abuse and misinformation on the platform.

He said the firm might demote likes and follows, adding that in hindsight he would not have designed the platform to highlight these.

He said that Twitter currently incentivised people "to post outrage".

Instead he said it should invite people to unite around topics and communities.

"It may be best if it becomes an interest-based network," he told TED curators Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.

Rather than focus on following individual accounts, users could be encouraged to follow hashtags, trends and communities.

Doing so would require a systematic change that represented a "huge shift" for Twitter.

On the topic of abuse, he admitted that it was happening "at scale".

"We've seen harassment, manipulation, misinformation which are dynamics we did not expect 13 years ago when we founded the company," he told TED curator Chris Anderson.

"What worries me is how we address them in a systematic way."

He has previously discussed the role played by likes and follows, which were designed to be prominent.

"One of the choices we made was to make the number of people that follow you big and bold. If I started Twitter now I would not emphasise follows and I would not create likes.

"We have to look at how we display follows and likes," he added.

Ms Pennington Rodgers asked him why, according to Amnesty, women of colour on average received abuse in one of 10 tweets they posted.

"It's a pretty terrible situation," Mr Dorsey admitted.

"The dynamics of the system makes it super-easy to harass others."

He said that Twitter was increasingly using machine-learning to spot abuse and claimed that 38% of abusive tweets were now identified by algorithms and then highlighted to humans, who decide whether to remove them from the platform.

He also said that the firm was working on making it easier to find its policies on abuse and was simplifying them.

Asked if he would show urgency in dealing with the issues, he replied simply: "Yes."

Ask Jack

The TED audience were invited to contribute to the conversation via the hashtag #askJackatTED, which received more than 1,000 questions within 10 minutes of the talk starting.

One of the questions came from journalist Carole Cadwalladr who spoke at TED on Monday and called on the tech firms, including Twitter, to directly address the issue of misinformation being shared widely on their platforms.

But in her question to Mr Dorsey, she turned her attention to abuse she has received on Twitter.

"I'd like to know why a video that showed me being beaten up and threatened with a gun to soundtrack of Russian anthem stayed up for 72 hours despite 1000s of complaints?" she wrote.

Mr Dorsey did not address that question and neither did he answer another one about how to deal with the huge number of malicious bots posting misinformation.

He was also shown a graph created by Zignal Labs which showed the number of human tweets versus tweets from suspected bots talking about topics in the recent election campaign in Israel.

Bots seemed to dominate when it came to tweets about contender Benny Gantz, who was narrowly defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr Dorsey was asked about this but did not answer.

Instead he said that the company was in the middle of measuring the "conversational health" of the platform, using a number of metrics, including how toxic conversations were and how much people are exposed to a variety of opinions.

"We have to create a healthy contribution to the network and a healthy conversation. On Twitter right now you don't necessarily walk away feeling you learned something."

TED 2019: 10 years of 'ideas worth spreading'

By Jane Wakefield

TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) is famous for turning 17-minute talks into viral videos. This year's conference has kicked off in Vancouver, offering a new set of thought-provoking talks under the tagline of 'ideas worth spreading'.

The theme for this year's conference is 'Bigger than Us' and includes talks from Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey, the president of Sierre Leone Julius Maada Bio and journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The conference has become a showcase for tech innovations, with the talks later shared online, some gaining millions of views.

TED is not without controversy. Some view it as cult-like and insular, others do not like the fact that talks are heavily rehearsed and formulaic - most speakers will kick off with a personal tale - with one critic recently describing it as "amateur dramatics for intellectuals".

And the conference, which prides itself on spreading good ideas, found itself at the centre of a sexual harassment scandal when five people, including one of the speakers, complained about being harassed during its 2017 conference.

But most agree that its fellowship program has become one of the best things about the annual conference. It offers around 20 "extraordinary innovators" a free pass for three conferences - tickets usually cost upwards of $5,000 (£3,800) - and a platform to showcase their ideas and turn them into businesses. They are also given mentoring with an expert dedicated to helping them expand their projects.

It used to be a sideshow of TED but is now an integral part of the conference - with day one dedicated to talks by fellows.

Now in its tenth year, the TED fellowship has created more than 400 fellows, and their talks have been viewed more than 250 million times.

The BBC, which has been attending TED since 2011, caught up with four past fellows to find out what being part of the TED community did for them.

The clever printer

In 2013, Skylar Tibbits had his own 'TED wow moment' when he showed off a 4D printer that allowed objects to self-assemble.

Since showing off his prototype system, Mr Tibbits has set up the Self Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which now has 15 researchers.

He told the BBC he still gets emails on a weekly basis asking about his original TED talk.

"TED gave a platform to present my ideas and work and invite people to collaborate with us. From that, companies approached us, funded us and collaborated with us.

"This opportunity really kick-started my career and gave a diving board for almost everything that came after," he said.

The phone can be used to look at the retina at the back of the eye and check the health of the optic nerve

Dr Andrew Bastawrous gave a TED talk in 2014, showing off an app that allowed any smartphone to diagnose sight loss.

Since then, the research project has grown into a major social enterprise based in seven countries, including Kenya, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

In Botswana, Peek Vision is working with the government to screen and test the eyesight of every school child.

Dr Bastawrous told the BBC: "Being a part of the fellowship has meant being with others who share a common path, a path to solve some of the biggest challenges today, alongside others walking this difficult but incredibly fulfilling journey. The programme has equipped, supported and catalysed an idea that is now coming to life on a global scale."

Sarah Parcak has become a veteran of TED conferences, where she is easily spotted thanks to her signature Indiana Jones hat.

She gained the moniker 'space archaeologist' because she uses satellite imagery which she combines with sophisticated algorithms to identify subtle changes on the ground which could signal a hidden human-made structure.

The system has located 31,000 lost settlements, a thousand tombs and potentially 17 pyramids in Egypt.

In 2016 she became the winner of the TED prize - a $1m award offered to an individual to "spark global change" and she used the money to set up a website GlobalXplorer to crowdsource undiscovered sites around the world, allowing citizen-scientists access to imagery and the ability to spot and report sites.

Since its launch some 85,000 people have studied more than 16 million satellite images, and helped discover 29,000 potential features in 700 sites in Peru.

Prof Parcak said: "I don't think GlobalXplorer would have happened - at least not in its current form - without the seeds that were planted in my fellowship, now seven years ago."

Lebanese inventor Ayah Bdeir became a TED Fellow in 2012, showcasing her littleBits kits which are made up of Lego-like bricks, with transistors attached, which snap together using magnets. Each brick is colour-coded and has a different functionality, including light, sound and movement.

Her aim was to encourage a new generation of inventors.

In 2016, the start-up joined forces with Disney to create branded kits for movies such as Star Wars. That ambitious program has been scaled back and now the two are focusing on educational partnerships, aiming to get more girls involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths).

The kits are in 10,000 US schools and the new project Snap The Gap will see kits given to 15,000 girls in California, with the aim of reaching all US states by 2023.

Ms Bdeir told the BBC: "The TED Fellowship was a pivotal moment in my career. It was a platform to really think big at the level of the world, not just technology."