Twitter and Pinterest Vets Pitch New Social App Tangle

Has social media been the source of a “terrible devastation” upon society?

A pair of Silicon Valley veterans apparently think so, and have debuted an app they say is designed to offer a countering effect, the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Jan. 4)

Biz Stone and Evan Sharp, two of the co-founders of Twitter and Pinterest, respectively, have raised $29 million for their startup West Co, the report added, citing a regulatory filing.

West Co introduced its first app, Tangle, in November, calling it a “new kind of social network, designed for intentional living,” the report added. The app, invite-only for the moment, recommends users share personal goals or “intentions” with friends, support each others aims, and “reflect” on how they are reached.

Stone said the current version of the app — which issues users notifications each morning asking “What’s your intention for today?” — was still an early test and could change prior to a larger public rollout.

“It turns out that creating something to help people navigate their lifetime is difficult work,” he told the FT, “but I think it’s worth it.”

The report also pointed to a recent podcast interview in which Sharp detailed his “eight-year-long obsession” with “really trying to understand what we fundamentally disrupted with the phone and social media so that I could … help make that a little bit better.

“What could I build that might help address just some of the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we’ve wrought the last 15 years?” he said.

In other social media news, PYMNTS wrote recently about the shift forcing platforms to reconfigure their systems to deal with the rising influence of generative artificial intelligence (AI). That technology, the report said, now accounts for 57% of all online material.

With that in mind, Meta, Pinterest and Reddit are all developing new tools to separate human and synthetic activity as machine-generated content becomes a routine part of online interaction. In Meta’s case, that means Vibes, a short-form video feed within its Meta AI ecosystem that features only AI-generated clips.

Reddit’s emphasis has been on moderation and identity verification. Earlier this year, the company said it would bolster tools to detect AI-driven bots and other nonhuman activity.

“Pinterest has focused on transparency,” PYMNTS added. “The platform now applies labels to Pins that are identified as AI-generated or modified. Detection is based on metadata and image classifiers. Labels appear automatically when AI involvement is confirmed.”