Jack Dorsey has responded to Elon Musk’s purported exposé generally known as “The Twitter Information,” and he’s performed so in an essay that’s mercifully not written as a Twitter thread. In it, the social community’s co-founder and former CEO says that he believes the corporate has nothing to cover, opposite to how the information have been offered. He additionally says he needs the data had been “launched Wikileaks-style,” and asks that the web not go after Twitter staff for perceived slights. In fact, his article additionally promotes his personal social networking protocol and Bitcoin.
Dorsey’s response comes after Elon Musk has spent over per week selling 5 selective doc releases generally known as the Twitter Information, which present inner paperwork, Slack logs, and emails round issues like Twitter’s removing of Donald Trump following the January sixth riots, moderation “blacklists,” and the way the location handled information about Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. The threads, and Musk’s promotion of them, have largely taken on a conspiratorial tone, portray the previous Twitter management and staff as being in cahoots with the federal government to silence Twitter customers.
Dorsey clearly doesn’t agree, saying his his publish that “errors have been made” at Twitter, however that he believes the corporate had “no ailing intent or hidden agendas, and everybody acted based on the most effective info we had on the time.”
Dorsey thinks the Twitter Information don’t go far sufficient
Later within the publish, Dorsey takes points with how the information have been handed over to particular journalists who then posted excerpts and reported on them. “I do nonetheless want for Twitter, and each firm, to change into uncomfortably clear in all their actions,” Dorsey writes, including that he needs the information obtained “many extra eyes and interpretations to contemplate.” It’s an fascinating request, as he’s primarily asking for receipts on his personal firm, as my co-worker Adi Robertson described whereas we have been discussing the article — it appears seemingly Dorsey is absolutely conscious of what sort of decision-making course of a full document-dump would reveal, and doesn’t assume it’d be all that damning.
Whereas Dorsey talks lots about how he thinks transparency and moderation ought to work in his publish, it’s potential he needs a extra clear course of as a result of the cherry-picked paperwork have been utilized by Musk and others to assault former Twitter workers. He obliquely references this by saying that “the present assaults on my former colleagues might be harmful and doesn’t clear up something,” however Dorsey’s description doesn’t fairly describe how dangerous issues have been. CNN reported on Monday that former head of belief and security Yoel Roth needed to go away his residence after Musk implied that he supported pedophilia in now-deleted tweets. Musk has additionally accused particular different former Twitter staff of not doing something to cease baby trafficking on the platform.
The Twitter Information posts have additionally been damaging in different methods — in a couple of cases, incomplete censoring leaked contact information for politicians, Twitter staff, and Dorsey himself.
It’s not the primary time Dorsey has apologized for what’s occurred after he left Twitter — final month he mentioned he was answerable for Musk’s preliminary wave of mass layoffs, saying they have been needed as a result of he grew the corporate too quick. Earlier this 12 months, Dorsey mentioned he believed that Musk was the “singular answer” he trusted to run Twitter as an organization and mentioned that he trusted Musk’s “mission to increase the sunshine of consciousness.” Whereas he doesn’t appear to have absolutely walked again that assertion but, he has challenged a few of Musk’s statements exterior of his newest publish.
Dorsey’s publish isn’t totally about Twitter. He additionally makes use of it to announce that he’s giving 1,000,000 {dollars} a 12 months to encrypted messaging app Sign and asks for strategies about different grants he ought to make within the areas of “social media and personal communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only cell OS.”
Dorsey himself can also be engaged on a decentralized social media protocol known as Bluesky, which will get a number of mentions within the publish, alongside the founder’s concepts of how social media ought to work (which he says he wasn’t in a position to implement at Twitter resulting from its standing as a public firm). His tenets contain retaining governments and firms from influencing conversations, ensuring that moderation choices occur on a “localized” foundation, and both letting individuals select their very own rating algorithms, or deciding to (in some way) not use one in any respect.
One significantly eyebrow-raising assertion from Dorsey reads “any content material produced by somebody for the web needs to be everlasting till the unique creator chooses to delete it,” including that “content material takedowns and suspensions shouldn’t be potential.” He does admit that stance might create “important points” with regards to issues like “criminal activity” (what occurs when this stance collides with somebody posting baby sexual abuse materials, or revenge porn?), however says that the best would “enable for a lot higher options than we now have at present.”
