SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter he defended his company’s ban on President Donald Trump in a philosophical Twitter thread that is his first public statement on the subject.
When Trump urged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol last week, and then continued to send potentially harmful messages, Dorsey said the resulting risk to public safety created an “extraordinary and unsustainable circumstance” for the company. After briefly suspending Trump’s account on the day of the Capitol riot, Twitter on Friday completely banned Trump, then reduced the president’s attempts to tweet with other accounts.
“I don’t celebrate or feel proud to have to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter,” Dorsey wrote. But he added: “I think that was the right decision for Twitter.”
Dorsey acknowledged that displays of strength such as Trump’s ban could set dangerous precedents, even calling them a sign of “failure.” While not in so many words, Dorsey suggested that Twitter needs to find ways to avoid having to make those decisions in the first place. It is not clear how this would work, although it could range from a previous and more effective moderation to a fundamental restructuring of social media.
At Dorsey-speak, that means Twitter needs to work harder to “promote a healthy conversation.”
Extreme measures such as the Trump ban also highlight the extraordinary power that Twitter and other Big Tech companies can wield without accountability or recourse, Dorsey wrote.
While Twitter was facing Trump’s problem, for example, Apple, Google and Amazon were effectively shutting down the right-wing Parler site. denying you access to app stores and cloud hosting services. The companies accused Parler of not being aggressive enough to eliminate calls for violence, which Parler has denied.
Dorsey declined to directly criticize his Big Tech counterparts, even noting that “this moment could demand that dynamic.” In the long run, however, he suggested that aggressive and domineering behavior could threaten the “noble purpose and ideals” of the open Internet by consolidating the power of some organizations over a common good that should be accessible to all.
The Twitter co-founder, however, had nothing specific to say about how his platform or other Big Tech companies might avoid these decisions 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 can free social media from centralized control by Facebook and Twitter.
But for now, Dorsey wrote, Twitter’s goal “is to disarm everything we can and make sure we’re all building toward greater common understanding and a more peaceful existence on earth.”