In a recent blog post, Twitter creator and former CEO Jack Dorsey claimed complete responsibility for Twitter’s faults, stating he lost the desire to fight and confessing that activists caused him to lose hope, leading to the formation of an exit strategy in 2020. Dorsey admitted that his biggest mistake at Twitter was “creating tools for Twitter to control the public conversation, rather than building tools for people to easily manage it all for themselves.”
Dorsey commented on his thoughts concerning the “Twitter Files” in a post titled “a native internet protocol for social media,” referring to file dumps by new CEO Elon Musk of Twitter’s internal emails and messages that disclosed government influence, in addition to discussion among Twitter employees regarding censorship.
“Here’s my opinion, and thoughts on how to remedy the flaws noted,” Dorsey continued, before listing three social media governing principles.
“1. Social media platforms must be resistant to government and corporate censorship. 2. Only the original author has the authority to remove information that they create. 3. Algorithmic selection is the best way to conduct moderation.”
“Twitter under my leadership and Twitter today do not adhere to any of these ideals. This is entirely my fault, because I stopped advocating for them when an activist bought our stock in 2020,” Dorsey went on to say that it was at this point that he began to prepare his exit.
Dorsey claims that after the decision to ban President Trump was made, he understood his firm had become “far too powerful,” and that it was the “wrong decision for the web and society,” referring to his January 2021 article.
According to Dorsey, the main motivator for the Trump ban was succumbing to outside pressure and advertising budgets, and Twitter made the choice for the “public corporate business at the moment.”
“I’m a firm believer that any work created for the internet should be permanent unless the original creator chooses to delete it,” he added.
The former Twitter CEO explained his perfect internet and how he believed content moderation should be practically nonexistent, claiming that “content takedowns and bans should not be conceivable.”
In terms of algorithms, Dorsey feels that only “ranking and relevance” are the way to go and that there should be open-source algorithms from which users can choose or not use any at all.
