Twitter acqui-hires Lightwell to improve conversations

Twitter on Tuesday acqui-hired US-based interactive app creation startup Lightwell for an undisclosed amount. Suzanne Xie, Founder, Lightwell, announced in a blogpost that the Lightwell team will be joining Twitter to help work on its Conversations initiative.

"We have been long-time passionate users of the product, and after spending more time with the Twitter team, we are incredibly energised to bring our experiences to further the broader mission of serving the public conversation," she said.

ALSO READ

6 key takeaways from Jack Dorsey’s town hall at IIT-Delhi

In March, Twitter introduced its new approach to improve the health of public conversations. Jack Dorsey, CEO, Twitter, had tweeted that the conversations on Twitter needs a checkup as the platform has been increasingly accused for hosting trolls, hostility, hoaxes, and other ills. The company also asked for outside experts to measure the “health” of conversations on its platform.

In its investors call for Q2 2019, the company said that health of the conversation continued to improve, and that they saw 18 percent fall in reports of spammy or suspicious behaviour. Dorsey said, health is going to be the “number one priority for quite some time”, and that there has been focus on proactively identifying content over the past year. The company made progress on how to make reporting bad behaviour easier by both victims and bystanders, he added.

"A lot of this is to focus on building more technology to address the problems, and I have a lot of confidence that we have great work ahead of us that we’ll continue to do — we’ll continue to leverage to help that situation. I do believe that health is going to be an ongoing initiative for us. It’s going to be our number one priority for quite some time," he said in the call.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

ALSO READ

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says everyone may get a blue tick – eventually