admin Jack Dorsey has responded to Elon Musk’s purported exposé generally known as “The Twitter Information,” and he’s carried out 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 recordsdata have been introduced. He additionally says he needs the knowledge 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 five selective document releases generally known as the Twitter Files, which present inside 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 positioning 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 The threads, and Musk’s promotion of them, have largely taken on a conspiratorial tone, portray the outdated Twitter management and staff as being in cahoots with the federal government to silence Twitter customers.
Dorsey clearly doesn’t agree, saying his his put up that “errors have been made” at Twitter, however that he believes the corporate had “no ailing intent or hidden agendas, and everybody acted in accordance with the perfect info we had on the time.”
Dorsey thinks the Twitter Information don’t go far sufficient
Later within the put up, Dorsey takes points with how the recordsdata 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 turn out to be uncomfortably clear in all their actions,” Dorsey writes, including that he needs the recordsdata bought “many extra eyes and interpretations to think about.” It’s an fascinating request, as he’s basically asking for receipts on his personal firm, as my co-worker Adi Robertson described whereas we have been discussing the article — it appears probably 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 quite a bit about how he thinks transparency and moderation ought to work in his put up, it’s attainable 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 employees. He obliquely references this by saying that “the present assaults on my former colleagues could possibly be harmful and doesn’t resolve something,” however Dorsey’s description doesn’t fairly describe how unhealthy issues have been. CNN reported on Monday that former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth needed to depart his house after Musk implied that he supported pedophilia in now-deleted tweets. Musk has also accused particular different former Twitter staff of not doing something to cease youngster trafficking on the platform.
The Twitter Information posts have additionally been damaging in different methods — in a couple of situations, 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 said he was responsible 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 yr, Dorsey said he believed that Musk was the “singular answer” he trusted to run Twitter as an organization and stated 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 put up.
Dorsey’s put up isn’t totally about Twitter. He additionally makes use of it to announce that he’s giving one million {dollars} a yr to encrypted messaging app Sign and asks for recommendations 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 working on a decentralized social media protocol called Bluesky, which will get a number of mentions within the put up, alongside the founder’s concepts of how social media ought to work (which he says he wasn’t capable of implement at Twitter as a consequence of its standing as a public firm). His tenets contain preserving governments and companies from influencing conversations, ensuring that moderation selections occur on a “localized” foundation, and both letting folks select their very own rating algorithms, or deciding to (by some means) not use one in any respect.
One significantly eyebrow-raising assertion from Dorsey reads “any content material produced by somebody for the web ought to be everlasting till the unique writer chooses to delete it,” including that “content material takedowns and suspensions shouldn’t be attainable.” He does admit that stance may create “important points” with regards to issues like “criminality” (what occurs when this stance collides with somebody posting youngster sexual abuse materials, or revenge porn?), however says that the perfect would “enable for much higher options than we’ve right now.”
