Dear Elon,
How's this for a proposal of how to fix Twitter in three easy steps:
1. Verification. Eliminate the bots through some form of verification that a real human is behind an @. There are several ways to do this. You can use some kind of zero knowledge proof service, or whatever the IRS uses where it matches the picture on your government issued ID to your live face, or you can give people the option of putting down a deposit, but once every address is a real person, the intelligence of the crowd can be leveraged to self-police everyone by aligning incentives.
2. Weighted Voting On Truth. Install a new button on each tweet, or maybe a simple drop down menu, that allows the community to vote on its truth from 1 - 10. Obviously, a lot of tweets are just self-expression and wouldn't need to be voted on at all, so the community wouldn't, but the option is always there. The backend programming would keep track of everyone's ability to recognize and vote for the Truth, and then weight the votes of the.people who are consistently correct more than people who aren't. The idea here is to incentivize voting for the truth to eliminate bias or agendas. The assumption being that a broad based diverse community of people can determine the Truth better than any other method, so if an individual is consistently voting with the overwhelming majority of votes, they are rewarded for their objectivity and dedication to the Truth by earning a more weighted vote. Maybe there's a threshold that requires any Tweet considered to be the Truth to have at least 90% agreement (adjusted as needed). This way nothing get censored and only what everyone agrees is factual is treated as fact. Everything else is opinion.
The Tweet itself would display the percent in the corner showing how trusted the community feels this information to be. Or factual content could be another color to stand out amongst the noise of opinions. The backend programming would also keep track of the Tweeter's track record of expressing what the community feels is the Truth. This percentage would be prominently displayed next to their name to incentivize sincere attempts at expressing the truth when they are trying to, as opposed to self-expression. Maybe tweets that are getting a lot of votes linger at the top of feeds to encourage more engagement. When initially posting, an individual could privately opt out of the need for votes because they are knowingly just expressing an opinion, so those tweets don't drag down their percentage. The tweets that achieve a majority endorsement from the community as factual truth will be displayed with a percentage of agreement and different color. Everything else is opinion and self-expression, so there' no restraints on free speech.
3. Eliminate Excessive Negativity. Thoughtful disagreement or constructive criticism is an important process in the discovery of Truth, so there's nothing wrong with lively debate. The problem is people have a tendency to devolve into angry trolls through online platforms and lash out at the world with excessive and unnecessary negativity, including hate speech, which could also be policed by the community through voting on comments with a scale of 1-10 in terms of excessive anger and hate, or thoughtful critique. If a person gets a 90% unnecessary meanness vote five times there's some kind of penalty whether they lose their deposit (if there is one), or they are suspended for a time, or they have a Wall of Shame color red appear on their tweets and comments for month. This would allow people to say whatever they want, but provide a way for the community to train everyone like a puppy to figure out how to express their disagreement without the toxicity that exists today.
Here's a motto: The Toxic Cleanse - Incentives Realigned.
Or even better: Twitter 2 - Electric Boogaloo.
