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Published on 2022-12-19
Two former Twitter employees have created a new platform named Spill, which is scheduled to launch next year and has emerged as an alternative to the social network now owned by Elon Musk, with the aim of boosting and prioritizing culture.
Since the arrival of the Tesla founder to the platform's board, news about Twitter has been relentless. Among other things, due to the controversial proposals and decisions of the new CEO regarding the new Twitter Blue verification system or matters related to the workplace. Among some of the news that has come to light are the staff cuts that have resulted in mass layoffs at the company, most of them notified by email to their employees.
One of those affected by this cessation was Alphonzo 'Phonz' Terrel, who was the global director of Social Media and Editorial at Twitter for three years until last November, when his dismissal was notified, as reported by TechCrunch. After leaving the social network, this former employee joined another ex-Twitter employee, DeVaris Brown — who served as a Product Manager on the social network for over a year — to create an alternative platform called Spill.
Spill is presented as "a real-time conversation platform that prioritizes culture," created by professionals "who deeply understand the challenges of today's social networks," according to the platform's website. This alternative to Twitter, which will be available in about six to eight weeks according to TechCrunch, uses an artificial intelligence (AI) language model to improve content moderation and user support. Additionally, it utilizes blockchain technology "to credit and reward creators and partners with major entertainment brands to offer exclusive content worth talking about," as stated on this site.
TechCrunch, on the other hand, points out that content creators on Spill will receive real money rewards, that is, in dollars, and not in cryptocurrencies.
The creators of this new social network aim to reward content creators, especially Black women, queer communities "and a variety of influential voices outside of the United States." For now, it is known that less than a dozen people and three advisors — among them, the former Twitter Design Chief, Dantley Davis — are working on the development of Spill. The company has not provided further details on how this service will work, although it has encouraged users to reserve their username and register their personal data to create a new account.
However, it was mentioned that users will initially be able to create, comment on, or share posts or 'spills' with other users, as well as organize chat events in the app. With this, it was emphasized that viral posts will be monetized.
ORIGIN OF SPILL
In the interview published by the mentioned media, the founders of Spill acknowledged that the idea to create Spill came to mind remembering that on their first day at Twitter, they were the only two Black employees on the platform.
The main goal of Spill, besides giving a voice to creators silenced by other social networks, is to "create a content moderation model that uses AI built by people of the culture," as Brown commented. To justify this approach, the creators of Spill insisted that there is an established history of racial bias within the hate speech detection algorithms used by most social networks.
So much so that, according to a study, it has been shown that tweets written by African Americans were 1.5 times more likely to be marked as offensive. Hence, the new platform seeks to develop a system that understands the linguistic nuances of different cultures to avoid censorship.
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