Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert,Hannah Getahun
Tue, December 13, 2022
Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey.Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
In a blog post, Jack Dorsey said he should be blamed solely for Twitter's content-related failures.
Dorsey decried attacks on his ex-colleagues and offered his thoughts on the future of social media.
As CEO, Dorsey said he led Twitter to do the "wrong thing for the internet and society."
In a Tuesday blog post, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey weighed in on the revelations made in the "Twitter Files" and said he led the social-media platform to do the "wrong thing for the internet and society."
The post first outlined Dorsey's thoughts on "principles" about social media he has come to believe: that social platforms "must be resilient to corporate and government control," that "only the original author may remove content they produce," and that "moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice."
"The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone," Dorsey wrote in the post, saying he "gave up pushing" for the principles when an unnamed "activist entered stock in 2020."
That year, The New York Times reported the activist hedge fund Elliott Management acquired a $1 billion stake in Twitter and called for Dorsey's ousting, though it is unclear whether Dorsey was referring to the company in his post.
Dorsey went on to write that he believed social-media companies had amassed too much power and that Twitter's decision to bar former President Donald Trump, under Dorsey's own leadership, was evidence of that power taken to an extreme.
"As I've said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society," Dorsey wrote.
The "Twitter Files" have provided some insight into the content-moderation practices of the social-media giant under Dorsey's leadership. Musk released the emails and internal documents making up the cache to independent journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
Included in the "Twitter Files" are debates between employees on whether to bar Trump for inciting violence following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, proof the platform limited the reach of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop — which was previously known — and acknowledgment that Twitter accepted requests from both Joe Biden's campaign and the Trump administration to remove content from the site.
While some of the content in the Twitter Files brought to light additional details and internal discussion about the platform's content-moderation practices, many of the policy decisions surrounding Trump's barring, and the rationale behind them, had previously been reported or acknowledged in Dorsey's 2020 statement to the Senate and congressional testimony after the Capitol riot.
Backlash over the Twitter Files has resulted in increased threats being levied against Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety. In a series of tweets, Musk added to the criticism of Roth, posting an excerpt of a paper written by the former Twitter executive in which he appears to advocate for a teen-friendly version of Grindr for young queer adults. Musk also agreed with tweets calling Roth a "creep."
The threats, which Dorsey condemned in his post without addressing Musk's behavior, have reportedly gotten so bad that Roth was forced to flee his home out of fear for his safety, CNN reported.
"The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn't solve anything," Dorsey wrote. "If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof."
In recent months, Dorsey has apologized (after massive layoffs by Musk) for growing "the company size too quickly," said shutting down the video-clip platform Vine was his "biggest regret," and agreed with Musk's decision to reverse Trump's Twitter ban, saying it was "a business decision." In April, Dorsey said he was "partially to blame" for damaging the internet.
His latest apologies are in contrast to his initial statement barring Trump — saying at the time it was "the right decision" — and his 2021 congressional testimony in which he acknowledged "some" responsibility for misinformation spreading on Twitter that contributed to the January 6 attack on the Capitol but said "the broader ecosystem," not just Twitter, had to be considered.
When he cofounded Twitter in 2006, Dorsey's approach to content moderation was seen as pro-free speech and the company "had to be dragged" into content moderation, J.M. Berger, a researcher on extremism on social platforms like Twitter, told Insider.
"Because of Jack Dorsey's personal views about freedom of speech and whatever his sympathies are ideologically, Twitter had to be dragged — kicking and screaming — into the age of content moderation," Berger told Insider. "So Twitter was really the last of the big three platforms to implement any kind of robust moderation."
Flaws in controversial decisions Dorsey made while attempting to moderate Twitter content, such as barring Trump and censoring the Hunter Biden-laptop story, have drawn ire from critics, including Musk. Since his acquisition, citing flaws in Dorsey's approach, Musk has implemented a more stringent approach toward "free speech absolutism" and has diminished content moderation on the platform.
"The way that Twitter's content moderation has changed since he's taken over has definitely skewed towards favoring the far-right," Berger previously told Insider, adding that he believed the billionaire was "intentionally empowering right-wing extremists."
Dorsey, Musk, and representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Jack Dorsey responds to Twitter Files: There were no ‘hidden agendas’
Chris Wattie / reuters
Karissa Bell
·Senior Editor
Tue, December 13, 2022
Jack Dorsey has waded into the Twitter Files discourse. Writing in a newsletter, Dorsey lightly criticizes the manner the files have been released, and condemned attacks on former Twitter executives.
“I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time,” Dorsey wrote. “As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”
The response is the first time the former CEO has addressed the “Twitter Files” in detail. The disclosures detail some of the company’s internal deliberations surrounding controversial decisions, like Donald Trump’s suspension and Twitter’s handling of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. However, the “files” have only been made available to a handful of individuals, who have only published snippets of Slack messages, emails, and screenshots from Twitter’s internal tools. The underlying documents have not been released widely, or provided to other media outlets.
Notably, Dorsey also addressed the ongoing harassment of former Twitter executives. “The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything,” he wrote. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.” CNN reported Monday that Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former Trust & Safety head, had “fled his home” after a surge in violent threats against him.
Interestingly, Dorsey doesn’t mention Musk by name in his lengthy post. Dorsey had once said that “Elon is the singular solution I trust” for Twitter, though it’s unclear if he still feels that way. Dorsey, whose personal email was made public in the original installment of the Twitter Files, didn’t respond when asked if he stands by the statement.
As with other recent statements from Dorsey, he also shares lots of ideas about how content moderation should work — namely that algorithms should be used in favor of “a centralized system — and his hopes for an “open protocol” that could “make social media a native part of the internet.” And he revealed that he intends to give messaging app Signal $1 million a year as part of an effort to fund companies working on such protocols.
You can read Dorsey’s entire post here.
Jack Dorsey warns against attacks on Twitter staff and dedicates $1M a year to Signal
Devin Coldewey
Tue, December 13, 2022 at 4:53 PM MST·3 min read
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey issued a warning on the social network's state and prospects, saying it meets none of the standards he hoped to achieve and that harassment of its staff is shortsighted and dangerous. It's time to move on, as he's said before, and to that end he's funding new efforts in "open internet development," starting with $1 million per year to Signal.
Starting in a Twitter thread but quickly transitioning to a blog post ("I don't want to edit everything into 280 char chunks," he wrote — shade he probably never anticipated throwing), Dorsey said that his hope to build a Twitter according to his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an unnamed activist investor.
"I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company," he wrote.
The principles he had hoped to build on — resilience to corporate and government control, user-controlled content with no exceptions and algorithmic moderation — are not present in today's Twitter, nor in the one he led, he admitted.
Even so, he wrote that, contrary to the insinuations accompanying the so-called Twitter Files, "there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time."
The various threads have been very selective in what they show and what they redact, while casting certain staff, particularly former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, as being power-mad and agenda-driven. Roth reportedly experienced harassment in person serious enough that he had to temporarily leave his home. On the whole there is little new in what has been published beyond a handful of convenient scapegoats for imagined abuse.
Of this Dorsey says:
As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.
Be careful what you wish for, Jack.
The conversations themselves, as I wrote last week, do in fact constitute a very interesting look at the difficulty of moderation under unprecedented circumstances. The frank and open discussion of how to interpret a rule or what action they should or shouldn't take is exactly what one would hope is happening behind the scenes of such a process. Imputations of bias have little or no documentary weight behind them, beyond whatever is lent by a carefully curated presentation openly intended to promote that narrative.
Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ offer a glimpse of the raw, complicated and thankless task of moderation
As to actual solutions, Dorsey is of course hard at work (or at least present) at Bluesky, but he calls out Mastodon and Matrix as other worthwhile avenues for development:
There will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet.
Putting his money where his mouth is, he announced that he'll start by funding Signal (definitely resilient to governments) to the tune of $1 million/year. More grants are forthcoming, he said, and solicited recommendations. And fortunately, since what appeared to be his personal email was inadvertently published by Matt Taibbi in the first Twitter Files thread, everyone should be able to get in touch.
Decentralized discourse: How open source is shaping Twitter’s future
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