Jack Dorsey warned that harassment of its staff is dangerous and that the social network does not meet the standards he hoped for. It is time to move on, as he has said before, and to that end he is funding new efforts in "open internet development."
After starting in a thread but quickly transitioning to a post, he said that his hope to build a Twitter according to his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an activist.
He wrote that he planned his exit at that time.
He admitted that the principles he had hoped to build on, resilience to corporate and government control, user-controlled content with no exceptions and algorithmic moderation, are not present in today'sTwitter.
He wrote that there was no ill intent or hidden agendas and everyone acted according to the best information they had.
The various threads have been very careful in what they show and what they redact, while casting certain staff, including the former head of Trust and Safety, as being power-mad and agenda-driven. According to reports, he had to leave his home because of the harassment. There isn't much new in what has been published beyond a few convenient scapegoats.
This is the one that Dorsey says.
As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.
Jack, please be careful with what you want.
The conversations themselves are an interesting look at the difficulty of moderation under unusual circumstances. The open discussion of how to interpret a rule is exactly what one would hope is happening behind the scenes of such a process. mputations of bias have little or no documentary weight behind them, other than a carefully edited presentation intended to promote that narrative.
Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ offer a glimpse of the raw, complicated and thankless task of moderation
As to actual solutions, Dorsey is working hard at Bluesky, but he calls out Mastodon and Matrix as other worthwhile avenues for development.
There will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet.
He said that he would start by funding Signal to the tune of $1 million per year. He asked for recommendations for more grants. Everyone should be able to get in touch since what appeared to be his personal email was accidentally published.
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