Jack Dorsey announces new Twitter team! Jack Dorsey announces a bold plan to support an independent team of “up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.”
“The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.”
The new team would follow a model similar to Square Crypto, a bitcoin-focused entity separate from Dorsey’s fintech platform, Square. The new Twitter entity would focus on open standards for decentralized processes across social platforms. He hinted that the fundamentals of blockchain technology might offer some tools for “open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization.”
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal and policy, tweeted that the new project would be called Blue Sky – this is just the company’s broader push to “support and foster the values of a free and open internet”
Dorsey also tweeted that this team would help address “abuse and misleading information,” since global policy enforcement strategies are proving difficult to scale. He mentioned that there was a propensity for social media to amplify outrage rather than healthy discourse – on that front, Kaliya Young, co-founder of the Internet Identity Workshop and the startup HumanFirst.Tech, said that the Blue Sky team and project should support “experts who have been in the trenches working for years” instead of starting from scratch.
“Social threat modeling should be done to understand how [social media] is impacting people… Technical protocols for content interoperability doesn’t solve content moderation or community management problems.”
It is unclear as to what objectives the Blue Sky team will tackle first. But to be fair, and to credit Dorsey, Square Crypto had a similarly ambitious model when it was first announced by Dorsey in March.
Eligible candidates should be “curious across disciplines” and have “experience working in the open on the blockchain”, according to Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal.
The announcement was received with general positivity on Twitter. Neha Narula, director of research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, responded to Dorsey’s announcement by tweeting a 100-page report on the hurdles of trying to build a decentralized web.
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