Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Twitter’s new CEO should focus on removing bots on the platform.
Jack Dorsey stepped down earlier this week and was replaced by Parag Agrawal, who was the company’s chief technology officer.
In an interview with Barron’s, Schmidt said: “There are too many automatic posters and not enough human posters. The next CEO should focus on that.”
Twitter claims that it identifies approximately 25 million accounts that could be spam or automated each month.
In a comment to Barron’s, a spokesperson for Twitter said the platform was working on expanding its harmful content detection systems.
“We’re now able to proactively surface more than 65% of abusive content that’s enforced on our service for human review instead of relying on reports from people using Twitter,” a spokesperson said.
Schmidt also addressed “misinformation” on social media companies.
“We can’t have a situation where the primary communication mechanisms are distorting truth,” Schmidt said.
He also noted social media’s reliance on polarizing content because it has the most engagement.
“To maximize revenue, you have to maximize engagement. To maximize engagement, you have to maximize outrage,” he said.
Schmidt recommended that the social media industry should come up with standards to address these issues. He also said more regulation and lawsuits could help address the problems.
