Keith Coleman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I'd be so sad if I was that community note writer and just... Man, it's so good. They just can't even keep the post up. Okay. Coming back from today's world, where this small amount of code is changing the way people understand the world and what they believe, and making the White House rescind their announcements, zooming back to the beginning of how this whole project started, what I heard just briefly is, Keith, you were just tired of managing PMs, you wanted to just work on something yourself, you wanted to work on something impactful away from corporate BS, and you basically just started looking for something that was impactful, important, and you found this. Talk about just how it all came to be at the beginnings of the story. Yeah. I mean, for me, the beginnings actually go back to why I joined, it was then, Twitter in 2016. I had a startup and we'd had some acquisition offers, and one of them was from this company, Twitter. It was 2016, it was the middle of the election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and there were something like three televised debates, but every day, there was a debate happening on Twitter, and it was very clear, this is where people are talking about these things that matter, where information is being shared, where ideas are being formed. As a user, it was obvious that I could get good information there, but it was also obvious that there was questionable information floating around. I remember just looking, as an outsider, thinking like, "Wow, this is a really hard problem and it also seems really important," so we ended up going to Twitter and the company was in a turnaround at that point. My first three years was just helping to get the company growing again, working on everything that was the consumer product, getting user growth going back and people wanting to work there again, et cetera, but a few years in, I was reflecting on what we had done. I think we had done a lot of good work getting momentum going, and people in the us and in the industry had tried things to deal with misleading information, but nothing was really working. It was obvious nothing was working. Nothing could handle the scale of the problem, nothing could handle the speed, and a lot of people just didn't trust the existing approaches. The existing approaches were either fact-checkers or internal trust and safety teams making decisions about what was or was not misleading. A lot of people just didn't want or trust that to be the way this was decided, which is very reasonable. I'm looking at that, I was still managing a large PM team. That's a whole story in itself. That job required a lot of energy in, and I didn't feel like I always saw the output that I wanted to see from it. I didn't see the change in the product I wanted to see and I was contemplating, "Should I go start a company? Should I do something else?" And I kept coming back to this problem. I'm like, "Man, how is the world going to deal with this information quality issue of what we get on social media?" Wherever get it. I'm at this company where you can make a difference on this problem, why not go and try some crazy ideas and see if one of them might work? I had a kid, I came back from paternity leave, I went to my boss, Kayvon. I was like, "Hey, Kayvon. How about I just stop doing my job and I go work on this instead? 'This' being trying some crazy ideas to see if we can deal with misleading info." He was stoked, so I went off and started working on that. It started with just reading any research I could on the problem and existing solutions. What was or was not working, what were the issues, and then into prototyping. off and started working on that. It started with just reading any research I could on the problem and existing solutions. What was or was not working, what were the issues, and then into prototyping. Then it ultimately led to us building and piloting this idea that became Community Notes.…

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