The CEO of Twitter has admitted the platform is no longer a place where nuanced or thoughtful discussion can take place, after a leading American political reporter quit the “anger video game” after constant attacks.

Jack Dorsey, who co-founded the social media site in 2006, said the company needed to fundamentally “focus more on conversational dynamics within Twitter”, after the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman slammed the platform’s increasing toxicity.

“We haven’t paid enough consistent attention here,” said Mr Dorsey. “Better organisation, more context, helping to identify credibility, ease of use.”

The 41-year-old Mr Dorsey, said to be worth $5bn, made the remarks in a Twitter thread after Ms Haberman said she was stepping back from Twitter after concluding the “viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty” it harboured were at all-time highs.

Ms Haberman, a widely respected reporter with almost 900,000 followers, tweeted on Friday that she was rethinking how to use the platform she signed up to 2009.

“With exception of breaking news and my own stories, taking a break from this platform,” she said. “No reason or prompt other than that it’s not really helping the discourse.”

Over the weekend, in an article in her newspaper, she was more expansive. “Twitter has stopped being a place where I could learn things I didn’t know, glean information that was free from errors about a breaking news story or engage in a discussion and be reasonably confident that people’s criticisms were in good faith,” she said.

She added: “The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs, with no end in sight. It is a place where people who are understandably upset about any number of things go to feed their anger, where the underbelly of free speech is at its most bilious.”

President Trump discusses why he likes Twitter "I like the power of it, I can combat fake news"

Ms Haberman, who previously worked for the New York Post and Politico and who is considered to have some of the most accurate sources on the Donald Trump’s thinking, said the president was partly to blame for creating an environment in which she was often subject to “swarms of vicious Twitter attacks”.

“Mr Trump has tried to turn everyone around him, including the journalists who cover him, into part of his story. And people on Twitter have started to react to me in that same way, treating me as if I am a protagonist in the president’s narrative.”

While she said there still many positive things about Twitter and she would continue to use it to monitor breaking news, she had concluded the costs of trying to interact with readers and commentators now outweighed the benefits.

“Twitter is now an anger video game for many users. It is the only platform on which people feel free to say things they’d never say to someone’s face,” she said.

“For me, it had become an enormous and pointless drain on my time and mental energy.”

Mr Haberman said there was an important discussion about journalism that needed to be had, including how members of the media had performed during the 2016 presidential campaign. The New York Times, among many US media organisations, was criticised for failing to anticipate Mr Trump’s appeal and accused of ignoring his supporters.

She added: “But Twitter is not where a nuanced or thoughtful discussion can happen.”

Mr Dorsey responded to that point by saying: “This is what we’d like to fix the most.”

As to Ms Haberman’s claim that another downside to Twitter was that “everyone is treated as equally expert on various topics”, he said: “One of the biggest areas I believe we can help. Helping to determine credible voices per topic in real-time is extremely challenging, but believe it’s possible. Mix of algos and network.”

11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Show all 11 1 /11 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Turn on Night Mode Twitter’s dark blue Night Mode is a lot easier on your eyes than its regular, vibrant theme. On the site, you can enable it by clicking your profile photo (on the right-hand side of the bar at the top of the screen) and selecting Night Mode. On Android and iOS, you need to tap your profile picture at the top of the screen and select Night Mode. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Lengthen your tweets A “small group” of users are no longer restricted by Twitter’s 140-character tweet limit. Even if you’re not a chosen one, you can double your limit to 280 characters on desktop by downloading the Tampermonkey plugin, going to https://gist.github.com/Prof9/c16fc4997e0ef5b22a15c43edd7f5f49, clicking Raw and then Install. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Improve search Twitter’s regular search tool can be a little messy, but Advanced Search makes it much easier for you to find specific things. Go to https://twitter.com/search-advanced and filter your search by word, hashtag, exact phrase, location, date and account. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Disable read receipts Like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, Twitter’s direct messaging service shows you when your messages have been seen by the person you sent them to. You can disable read receipts though. On Android, iOS and the site, go to Settings and Privacy, click on Privacy and Safety and disable read receipts. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Monitor your tweets Retweets and Likes only form part of the story, as far as tweet engagement is concerned. You can view a lot more information about how people have reacted to your updates, including the number of times they’ve been seen and the number of times people have interacted with them. Just open your tweets and hit the View Tweet Activity button. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Trim the fat If you feel like you’re drowning in push notifications, you can cut down the number you receive from Twitter by going to Settings, Notifications, Push Notifications and deselecting the types of notifications you wouldn’t like to receive. You can also enable sleep settings, which allow you to switch off all mobile updates during certain hours of the day. On the site, go to Settings, Mobile and select your hours. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Save data You can stop videos from playing automatically on desktop and the Twitter app. On the site, you can do this by going to Settings, Account, Video Tweets and unchecking Video Autoplay. On both the Android and iOS versions of the app, go to Settings, General, Data Usage, Video Autoplay, and choose between Mobile data & Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Only, and Never. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Save even more data You can save even more data and completely transform your timeline in the process by disabling images. Just go to Settings, Data Usage and uncheck the Image Previews box. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Customise your profile Editing your Twitter profile is really straightforward, just go to your profile and click the large Edit Profile button. However, there’s one customisation option that’s easy to miss. As well as your name, bio and profile photos, you can change your colour scheme. The option is only available on the Twitter site, and is sandwiched between the Website and Birthday sections. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Browse properly One of the Twitter app’s most annoying features is its in-app browser, which links automatically open up in. You can sacrifice it for your favourite mobile browser by going to Settings, Display and Sound and unchecking the Use In-App Browser box. 11 useful Twitter features you might not know about Subscribe to tweets You can set up alerts that let you know whenever a certain account tweets, but it’s a two-stage process. First, on the app, go to Settings, Notifications, Push Notifications, Tweets and turn the toggle button on. Then open the profile page of the account you want to receive notifications from, tap the Bell icon next to the Following button and choose between All Tweets, Only Live Video and Off.

She also said that on Twitter, everything was shrunk down to the same size, making it harder to discern what was a big deal and what was not, adding: “All outrages appear equal.”

Mr Dorsey conceded: “Def a problem. Believe we can help solve by showing more context and related conversation.”

The Twitter co-founder said that the idea behind introducing “the ranking the timeline” was to show you “what matters first”. He added: “Lots of work still to do.”

Ms Haberman is not the only high profile political reporter to announce she is boycotting the medium. John Roberts of Fox News, who recently found himself in the centre of controversy after agreeing to pick up the microphone and deliver a question to Mr Trump after the president refused to accept one from a CNN correspondent, said he was also quitting.

“In solidarity with my colleague @maggieNYT - whom I believe is an absolutely stellar journalist, I too am pulling back from Twitter,” he wrote. “She has it right - a bilious anger video game.”

In Britain, the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said she had also considered quitting social media because of the increasingly “ugly” online atmosphere.

“I’ve tried to pull back and I’ve thought about coming off it altogether,” Ms Kuenssberg told author and former Labour spin doctor Tom Baldwin in an interview for a new book. “Partly that’s because it’s uglier out there now; it’s like a playground where people want to shout each other down.”