Jack the Twitter founder Dorsey took the blame for Twitter’s controversial content decisions the platform made under his leadership, while also warning of content control by governments and corporations.
Dorsey began the statement in a Twitter thread, but moved it to a blog post, explaining, “I don’t want to edit everything into 280-character chunks.” The founder said he hoped to build a Twitter based on the principles he had learned through his “past actions as a co-founder of Twitter” but that he “completely gave up on pushing those ideas after an” activist entered our actions in 2020. .”
“I planned my exit at that time knowing that I was no longer a good fit for the company,” he wrote.
The principles he hoped to achieve as a public company — resistance of social media to corporate and government control, user-controlled content, and moderation implemented by algorithmic choice — were not present when he ran the company, nor on Twitter today, he said.
His statement follows the ongoing “Twitter Files” series currently promoted by Elon Musk, the new CEO of Twitter, as exposés of “suppression of free speech.”
Dorsey addresses Trump’s account suspension, one of the main themes during the third installment, admitting: “We did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the Internet and society.”
“The biggest mistake I made was to continue to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, instead of building tools for people who use Twitter to easily manage for themselves,” he explained. “This saddled the company with too much power and opened us up to significant external pressure (such as ad budgets).”
Still, despite the hyperbole surrounding the Twitter files, the Twitter co-founder wrote that “there were no malicious intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted on the best information we had at the time.” Dorsey also discusses how transparency and moderation are key to improving the social media platform, saying he wants leaks “to be published Wikileaks-style, with a lot more eyes and interpretations to consider.” Instead, Musk and select conservative journalists selected documents to release to the public, often handing them out without proper context. Following the release of the files, there have been reports of attacks on former employees, which Dorsey addressed: “The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and do not solve anything. If you want to blame, point it at me and my actions, or the lack of them.
The co-founder discussed possible solutions for the new Twitter under Musk’s leadership, proposing a set of ranking and relevance algorithms that users could create and choose to suit their needs (or not use at all). In particular, in a recent interview with ReutersElla Irwin, who has been installed as Twitter’s new head of trust and security, said Musk encouraged the company to rely more on automation and less on human review when making content moderation decisions.
Dorsey also announced that he will start funding Signal, which has remained resistant to government control, at $1 million a year. He said more grants would be issued. “I’m opening a new category of #startsmall grants: ‘open internet development,’” she said. “It will start with a focus of providing cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile operating system.”
He asked readers to send him potential candidates, which shouldn’t be too difficult a task since Matt Taibbi shared the co-founder’s email in the first run of “Twitter Files.”
