Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey addresses students during a town hall on the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Recent Delhi, India, November 12, 2018.
Anushree Fadnavis | Reuters
Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey didn’t mention Elon Musk by name. But in a blog post on Tuesday, he made it clear that the corporate he once led still had significant problems then and now.
Dorsey said he was adding his voice to discussion across the “Twitter Files,” which Musk began releasing last week to support his claims that prior management was biased against conservatives in its handling of content moderation.
Firstly of his post, Dorsey said he’s come to imagine in three principles. Social media must withstand “corporate and government control,” the creator is the one one that can remove content they produce, and “moderation is best implemented by algorithmic selection.”
“The Twitter once I led it and the Twitter of today don’t meet any of those principles,” Dorsey wrote.
Musk, who closed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October, has rolled back may of the old moderation policies. He’s also welcomed back former President Donald Trump, who was permanently kicked off the positioning under Dorsey’s leadership after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Dorsey didn’t level any specific criticism at Musk. He said he personally abandoned his efforts to push the corporate in the precise direction after activist firm Elliott Management got involved with the corporate over two years ago.
“That is my fault alone,” Dorsey wrote. “I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020.”
Regarding Twitter’s decision to suspend Trump, Dorsey said he believes “there was no unwell intent or hidden agendas, and everybody acted based on the most effective information we had on the time.”
Still, he said that “mistakes were made” and Twitter can be in a greater position today if the corporate “focused more on tools for the people using the service quite than tools for us.”
Dorsey said that normally social messaging platforms shouldn’t take down content or suspend accounts, because “doing so complicates necessary context, learning, and enforcement of criminality.”
He promoted the thought of a “free and open protocol for social media” that may not owned by anyone person or company because the only strategy to adhere to his stated principles.
“The issue today is that we have now corporations who own each the protocol and discovery of content,” Dorsey wrote. “Which ultimately puts one person accountable for what’s available and seen, or not.”
Dorsey cited Bluesky, a nonprofit organized by Twitter, in addition to Mastodon and Matrix as emerging projects that might potentially live as much as his view of what constitutes a free and open social media protocol. He said he can be offering grants to promising projects, starting with $1 million to Signal, an encrypted messaging app.
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