SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO defends his company’s ban on President Donald Trump in a philosophical Twitter thread that is his first public statement on the subject.
When Trump incited his followers last week to storm the U.S. Capitol and then tweeted potentially ominous messages, Dorsey said the resulting risk to public safety creates an “extraordinary and unsustainable circumstance” for the company. After briefly suspending Trump’s bill on the day of the Capitol riots, Twitter completely banned Friday, when the president’s attempts to tweet with other accounts were thwarted.
“I do not celebrate the pride of banning @realDonaldTrump from Twitter,” Dorsey wrote. But he added: “I believe it was the right decision for Twitter.”
Dorsey acknowledges that strengths like the Trump ban could set dangerous precedents and even call them a sign of ‘failure’. While not in so many words, Dorsey suggested that Twitter should find ways to prevent them from having to make such decisions. Exactly how this would work is not clear, although it may range from earlier and more effective moderation to a fundamental restructuring of social networks.
In Dorsey-speak, this means that Twitter needs to work harder to promote a healthy conversation.
Extreme measures such as the ban on Trump also underscore the extraordinary power that Twitter and other Big Tech companies can use without using liability or legal aid, Dorsey writes.
While Twitter has struggled with the Trump problem, Apple, Google and Amazon, for example, have effectively shut down the right-wing website Parler. by denying access to app stores and cloud hosting services. The companies complained that Parler was not aggressive enough to remove calls for violence, which Parler denied.
Dorsey did not want to directly criticize his Big Tech peers, and even remarked that “this time in time can evoke this dynamic.” Over the long term, however, he suggested that aggressive and dominant behavior could threaten the ‘noble purpose and ideals’ of the open Internet by entrenching the power of some organizations over a community that should be accessible to all.
However, the co-founder of Twitter had little to say specifically about how his platform or other Big Tech companies could avoid such choices in the future. Instead, he touched on an idea that, taken literally, sounds a bit like the end of Twitter itself – a long-term project to develop a technological “standard” that could free social networks from central control through Facebook and Twitter.
But for now, Dorsey wrote, Twitter’s goal is “to disarm as much as possible and ensure that we all build a greater common understanding and a more peaceful existence on earth.”