Jack Dorsey Has Responded To Elon Musk’s Alleged Exposition Known As “The Twitter Files” And He Has in an essay that is fortunate not written as a Twitter thread. In it, the co-founder and former CEO of the social network says he believes the company has nothing to hide, contrary to how the files have been presented. He also says he wished the information had been released “Wikileaks-style,” and asks the internet not to go after Twitter employees for perceived disdain. Of course, his article also promotes his own protocol for social networks and Bitcoin.
Dorsey’s response comes after Elon Musk spent more than a week on promotion five selective document releases known as the Twitter files, which shows internal documents, Slack logs, and emails about things like Twitter’s removal of Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 riots, moderating “blacklists,” and how the site handled news about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The threads, and Musk’s promotion of them, have largely taken on a conspiratorial tone, portraying longtime Twitter leadership and employees as in cahoots with the government to silence Twitter users.
Dorsey clearly disagrees, saying in his post that “mistakes were made” on Twitter, but that he believes the company had “no malicious intent or hidden agendas and that everyone was acting on the best information we had on that.” had time.”
Dorsey thinks the Twitter Files don’t go far enough
Later in the post, Dorsey expresses concern about how the files were handed over to specific journalists who then posted snippets and reported on them. “I still wish Twitter, and any company, become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions,” Dorsey writes, adding that he wishes the files “get a lot more eyes and interpretations to consider.” It’s an interesting request, since he’s essentially asking for receipts from his own company, as my colleague Adi Robertson described as we discussed the article – it seems likely that Dorsey is fully aware of what kind of decision-making process a full document is. dump would reveal, and don’t think it would be so damned.
While Dorsey talks a lot about how he thinks transparency and moderation should work in his post, it’s possible he wants a more transparent process since the handpicked documents have been used by Musk and others to attack former Twitter employees. He obliquely refers to this by saying that “the current attacks on my former colleagues may be dangerous and solve nothing,” but Dorsey’s description doesn’t quite describe how bad things have been. That reports CNN Monday that former head of trust and security Yoel Roth had to leave his house after Musk suggested he supported pedophilia in now-deleted tweets. Musk has also accused specifically other former Twitter employees for doing nothing to stop child trafficking on the platform.
The Twitter Files posts have been damaging in other ways too – in a few cases, incomplete censorship leaked contact information for politicians, Twitter employees and Dorsey herself.
It’s not the first time Dorsey has apologized for what happened after he left Twitter. Last month, he said he was responsible for Musk’s first wave of mass layoffs for growing the company too quickly. Earlier this year, said Dorsey he believed Musk was the “single solution” he trusted to run Twitter as a business and said he trusted Musk’s “mission to expand the light of consciousness”. While he doesn’t appear to have fully reversed that statement yet, he has challenged a some quotes from Musk outside his last post.
Dorsey’s post isn’t all about Twitter. He’s also using it to announce that he’s giving $1 million a year to encrypted messaging app Signal and is asking for suggestions on other grants he should give in the areas of “social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin and a mobile operating system for internet only’. .”
Dorsey himself is also working on a decentralized social media protocol called Bluesky, which is mentioned several times in the post, alongside the founder’s ideas about how social media should work (which he says he couldn’t implement on Twitter due to his status as a public company). His principles include preventing governments and corporations from influencing conversations, ensuring moderation decisions are made on a “local” basis, and either letting people choose their own ranking algorithms, or deciding (somehow) not to use one at all.
A particularly startling statement from Dorsey reads, “any content produced for the internet by anyone should be permanent until the original author chooses to remove it,” adding that “removing and suspending content shouldn’t be possible. ” He does admit that his stance can cause “significant problems” when it comes to things like “illegal activity” (what happens if this stance clashes with someone who posts child sexual abuse material or revenge porn?), but says it ideal “allows for much better solutions than we have now.”
