Twitter outplays Facebook, again.
The same week Sophie Zhang exposes yet another way of using Facebook to support dictatorships and fuel hate speech, Twitter launches its African branch in Ghana.
It’s been a busy week in the social media landscape, and it is only Tuesday.
Yesterday, Sophie Zhang exposed the loophole on Facebook pages that allows dictatorships to create fake engagement and kill diversity of opinion.
While Facebook’s PR team was battling yet another scandal, Twitter announced its operations in Africa, opening a new HQ in Ghana.
In a brilliant report by The Guardian, the data scientist who worked for the social media giant tells us how she tried to report this to senior management but was ignored. Here’s her own account of events:
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey’s twitter was full of praise for taking the bold move and establish presence in Ghana.
What do you think is the future of social networks and tech giants?
Paul Ford has written about it on Wired and has a quite an interesting take:
If we’re going to live together, the giants and me, I’d like to ask them something. Humbly. If you’re a product manager working on a feed or search interface inside of a giant tech company, you have access to hundreds of billions of hours of human attention. Could you help your users spend one hour a year learning about what’s coming for the world, climate-wise, with a small dose of civics to go with it?
Because, if you did, that would be 2 or 3 billion hours of shared experience. Two to 3 billion hours of people learning how important it is that we come together calmly. And that is a beautiful canvas of time upon which to paint a future. It would be one hell of a product. We’re counting on you.
We have no choice. You won.
Great way to position themselves by positioning the other - "As a champion for democracy, Ghana is a supporter of free speech, online freedom, and the Open Internet, of which Twitter is also an advocate."