Jack Dorsey blames Twitter failures and donates $1 million to Signal

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Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has blamed Twitter for controversial content decisions the platform has made under his leadership, while warning against government and corporate scrutiny of content.

Dorsey started the statement in a Twitter thread but moved it to a blog post, explaining that I don’t want to edit everything in 280-character chunks. The founder said he hoped to build a Twitter based on principles he had learned in his past actions as a co-founder of Twitter, but had completely given up on advocating for those ideas after an activist was entered our stock in 2020.

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I planned my exit at that time knowing that I was no longer good for the company, he wrote.

The principles it hoped to achieve as a public company, the resilience 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 in today’s Twitter, he said.

His statement follows the ongoing Twitter Files series currently being touted by Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk as an exposition of the suppression of free speech.

Dorsey addresses the suspension of Trumps account, one of the major topics of the third installment, and admitted, We did the right thing for the public company at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society.

The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in creating tools to allow us to manage the public conversation, as opposed to creating tools that allow people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves- same, he explained. This burdened the company with too much power and exposed us to significant outside pressures (such as advertising budgets).

Yet despite the hyperbole surrounding the Twitter files, the Twitter co-founder wrote that there was no ill intent or hidden agenda, and everyone acted on the best information we had. at the time. Dorsey also explains how essential transparency and moderation are to improving the social media platform and says he wants leaks to be published Wikileaks-style, with a lot more eyes and interpretations to watch. take into account. Instead, Musk and some conservative journalists have selected documents for public release, often distributing them without proper context. Following the release of the files, there were 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 blame, point it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.

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The co-founder discussed potential solutions for the new Twitter under Musks, and offered a set of ranking and relevance algorithms that users could create and choose based on their needs (or not use at all). ). Notably, in a recent interview with Reuters, Ella Irwin, who has been named Twitter’s new chief trust and safety officer, said Musk had encouraged the company to rely more on automation and less on tweaking. human review when making content moderation decisions.

Dorsey also announced that he would begin funding Signal, which has remained resilient to government control, with $1 million per year. He said more grants would be given. I will be opening a new category of #startsmall grants: Open Internet Development, he said. It will start by awarding 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 potential candidates his way, which shouldn’t be too difficult a task as Matt Taibbi shared the co-founders’ email when it first ran Twitter Files.

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