Twitter Founder And Former CEO, Jack Dorsey, Says "This Is My Fault Alone"
Advertisement
The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company."--Jack Dorsey
The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. 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"--Jack Dorsey
Well isn't that nice! Some accountability in post by the founder and former CEO. The cover-up is almost always worse than the actual crime. Running a company that big, that important to the public discourse, and that powerful around the world has to be an almost IMPOSSIBLE job. Which is why he probably feels like he never should've done it to begin with. Like he said...he should've insisted on building tools for the users of the platform to manage the public conversation for themselves and that only the original author of the post should be able to remove content posted on the app. Twitter never needed to moderate content (other than maybe fighting against obvious bots) because they were protected by Section 230. They had no actual liability so what was the incentive to act at the behest of the government?
To my knowledge, Jack hasn't really been at the crux of the controversy surrounding the twitter files. That has been more on Vijayi and Yoel Roth. Jack seemed out of the loop, which is part of the problem. Maybe he actually didn't know that twitter was shadow banning. If he did know...this is going to be a problem:
If I were Jack I would be IRATE that his team put him in that position. Like, YO, YOEL, you just let me commit perjury after all the stock options I gave you? What the fuck?!
I am very interested to see how things change going forward and if Congress does anything further regarding twitter or the other social media giants.
It was definitely not @Jack's fault alone, but I love a guy who will stand up and take the slings and arrows when shit hits the fan.