Twitter, like other social media platforms, has come under fire for being a place for rancorous and toxic conversations. In addition to removing abuse and spam, the company is broadening its scope to examine how it's enabling public conversation. In November, Twitter halted its verification system, calling it "broken" after the process became seen as a stamp of approval for trolls, white supremacists and others disseminating hateful speech online.

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The changes come as tech companies face a backlash over the negative impact some critics say they have on society. Late last year, Facebook even cited research indicating that social media can be bad for mental health. In addition to proliferating propaganda and fake news, Twitter has been criticized for not doing enough to prevent abuse and harassment. Many women have been driven off Twitter by vicious trolls.

Twitter has also been dealing with the congressional investigating into how social-media services like Twitter, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube were manipulated during the election. Twitter has come under intense scrutiny for being ill-prepared to address the magnitude of the situation. In a recent submission to Congress, Twitter said Russian-linked bots shared President Donald Trump's tweets almost half a million times during the final months of the 2016 election.

Dorsey's request for proposals is the latest effort by Twitter to address such manipulation. It has banned Russian state media accounts from buying ads and is creating a "transparency center" to show how much political campaigns spend on advertising, the identity of the organization funding the campaign, and what demographics the ads targeted.

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Facebook has also been battling with the perception that it's a swamp for fake news. It's tried to fix that by focusing on "meaningful interactions" between friends and family on the site. The company is also prioritizing information from publishers that remain on the social network by measuring how trustworthy they are. Trustworthiness is based on a recent survey of U.S. Facebook users that gauged their familiarity with, and trust in, different sources of news.

Bloomberg