Aaron Levie says machine learning is the way to fix Twitter's abuse and troll problem.
Adam Rifkin stashed this in Machine Learning
Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker and Social Capital's Chamath also chime in:
Source: http://www.recode.net/2016/10/19/13332002/twitter-fix-chamath-mary-meeker-aaron-levie
Stashed in: Twitter!, Kleiner Perkins, Awesome, Box!, Salesforce, Turing, Trolling!, @chamath, Training
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box:
“[You clearly need to] get rid of the abuse and troll problem. You can easily fix it with machine learning and being able to down-vote people [so] they just don’t show up in your stream. That should be fairly trivial.”
Nick Bilton, editor at large for Vanity Fair:
“If I was given Twitter, first, it would be my sole job. Second, I would probably cut the number of people who work for the company in half. Third, I would literally focus every single effort I have on solving the trolling problem, because you cannot grow that company, you cannot get people to sign up, you have people leaving — celebrities are leaving all the time. ... That’s the fundamental problem with the company and if they haven’t figured it out in 10 years, someone needs to.”
Bullies and trolls are why Salesforce and Disney dropped their bids?
Walt Disney Co. decided not to pursue a bid for Twitter Inc. partly out of concern that bullying and other uncivil forms of communication on the social media site might soil the company’s wholesome family image, according to people familiar with management’s thinking.
...
There were other reasons for Disney not to pursue Twitter. The social media pioneer, creator of the 140-character tweet, is losing money and yet sports a market value of almost $12 billion. That would be a big deal even for Disney, which has a market value 12 times that. Some of Disney’s largest investors called the company over the past few weeks to express their displeasure with a Twitter purchase for those reasons, people close to the companies said.
Salesforce.com Inc. also decided against a Twitter bid, as did Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
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Twitter has for years faced criticism for its hands-off approach to abuse and harassment on its service. Because people don’t have to use their real names, racist, sexist and anti-Semitic internet “trolls” have thrived on the platform. The company has pledged to become more serious about the issue in the last year, working on solutions such as letting people block keywords. Still, attacks this year have led to temporary departures of high-profile users including Leslie Jones, an actress in the movie “Ghostbusters,” as well as a New York Times journalist.
Twitter has only recently started exploring technological solutions to harassment on its service. Disney’s discomfort with abuse on the site indicates that it’s a larger problem for Twitter’s business prospects than its executives imagined.
Source:
1:45 PM Oct 19 2016