Posts Tagged: Matters

Jack Dorsey: ‘Nothing that is said now matters’

Jack Dorsey is at it again. The twitter co-founder shared another rambling tweetstorm, in which he mused about Twitter’s shortcomings, user trust and whether or not the platform should be permanently banning users.

The comments come on the heels of a turbulent week for Twitter, which is facing uncertainty about what will happen to its platform with Elon Musk at the helm. But if people were hoping Dorsey could add some clarity to the discussion, they’ll likely be disappointed.

“Every decision we made was ultimately my responsibility,” he said. “In the cases we were wrong or went too far, we admitted it and worked to correct.”

The comments may have been an oblique reference to Elon Musk’s earlier tweets targeting a top Twitter policy official, but he didn’t directly address the situation. Instead, he shared some vague thoughts about what Twitter should do to fix itself.

“Some things can be fixed immediately, and others require rethinking and reimplementing the entire system,” he said. “A transparent system, both in policy and operations, is the right way to earn trust. Whether it’s owned by a company or an open protocol doesn’t matter _as much as_ deliberately deciding to be open about every decision and why it was made.”

Dorsey also seemed frustrated by what current CEO Parag Agrawal has referred to as “noise” about what’s happening to the company. “Doing this work means you’re in the arena,” Dorsey tweeted. “Nothing that is said now matters. What matters is how the service works and acts, and how quickly it learns and improves. My biggest failing was that quickness part. I’m confident that part at least is being addressed, and will be fixed.”

Dorsey added that it’s “crazy and wrong” that “individuals or companies bear this responsibility,” in an apparent reference to past unpopular decisions. “I don’t believe any permanent ban (with the exception of illegal activity) is right, or should be possible. This is why we need a protocol that’s resilient to the layers above.”

Musk’s buyout has rocked Twitter, a company whose own executives have told employees they are unsure what direction Musk will take the platform. Musk, who has said he has “no confidence” in the company’s current leadership, has suggested that he would drastically scale back the company’s existing content moderation policies and, potentially, its staff.

Whether Musk has Dorsey’s backing has been a major source of speculation. Dorsey said earlier in the week that “Elon is the singular solution I trust,” and said that his buyout is getting the company out of an “impossible” situation in which it is tied to an ad-based revenue model. Both Dorsey and former Facebook board member Peter Thiel reportedly encouraged Musk to take Twitter private, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Musk has reportedly floated the idea of charging organizations to embed tweets on other websites, and ramping up Twitter’s subscription product Twitter Blue. He also reportedly wants to replace Agrawal with an executive of his own choosing, Reutersreported Friday.

Dorsey’s comments are also notable for what he didn’t say. He didn’t mention Musk by name, and he didn’t defend Twitter’s employees, though he said “the company has always tried to do its best given the information it had.”

Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Why Flagging Matters

YouTube allows people anywhere to share their stories with the world. They share their sense of humor, their talents, their opinions, what’s happening around them and within them. YouTube is also a community, and over the years, people have used the flagging feature located beneath every video and comment to help report content they believe violates our Community Guidelines.

We want to empower you, the YouTube community, to better understand how flagging works and how you can get involved in maintaining our community guidelines. To shed some light on how your flagging activity has helped keep YouTube a platform where openness and creative expression are balanced with responsibility, here are some of the latest data:

  • Over 90 million people have flagged videos on YouTube since 2006 – that’s more than the population of Egypt – and over a third of these people have flagged more than one video.
  • As YouTube grows, the community continues to be very active in flagging content: the number of flags per day is up over 25 percent year-on-year.
  • Community flagging on YouTube is international: People from 196 countries have flagged a video. The five countries with the most accurate flagging rates are: Indonesia, Turkey, Germany, Ukraine and France.
  • We’re also continuing to strengthen our policy enforcement processes: In 2015 alone, we removed 92 million videos for violation of our policies through a mix of user flagging and our spam-detection technology. While we are vigilant and fast in removing terrorist content and hate speech, it’s worth noting that it actually represents a very small proportion of the content that violates our guidelines – those two violations account for only 1 percent of the videos removed in 2015.

When flagging, you can report which policy you think a video violates, from spam and sexual content to harassment and violent content. This helps us route and review flagged content more efficiently and effectively:

We have trained teams, fluent in multiple languages, who carefully evaluate your flags 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year in time zones around the world. They remove content that violates our terms, age-restrict content that may not be appropriate for all audiences, and are careful to leave content up if it hasn’t crossed the line. As YouTube grows, we continue to scale our policy enforcement resources to meet your needs as a community.

Flagged content, however, doesn’t automatically get removed. YouTube is an important global platform for information and news, and our teams evaluate videos before taking action in order to protect content that has an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic purpose.

We also take into account local laws in the countries where we operate and if we receive a valid legal notice that content violates a local law, we will restrict that content in the local country domain. You can find information about government removal requests in Google’s Transparency Report. Similarly, if we remove content for policy reasons after receiving a valid legal request, we will include that in our transparency reporting.

We want to encourage you to continue flagging and we hope this additional transparency will help you continue reporting responsibly. For more information about how these processes work, visit our Policy and Safety Hub.

Posted by Juniper Downs, Head of YouTube Public Policy, who recently watched “Leon Bridges’ NPR Tiny Desk Concert.”


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