Jack Dorsey has responded to Elon Musk’s purported exposé often called “The Twitter Information,” and he’s performed 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 often called the Twitter Files, which present inner paperwork, Slack logs, and emails round issues like Twitter’s elimination 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 previous Twitter management and staff as being in cahoots with the federal government to silence Twitter customers.
Dorsey clearly doesn’t agree, saying in his submit that “errors had been made” at Twitter, however that he believes the corporate had “no in poor health intent or hidden agendas, and everybody acted in response to the very best data we had on the time.”
Dorsey thinks the Twitter Information don’t go far sufficient
Later within the submit, Dorsey takes points with how the recordsdata had 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 into uncomfortably clear in all their actions,” Dorsey writes, including that he needs the recordsdata obtained “many extra eyes and interpretations to contemplate.” It’s an fascinating request, as he’s primarily asking for receipts on his personal firm, as my co-worker Adi Robertson described whereas we had been discussing the article — it appears doubtless Dorsey is totally conscious of what sort of decision-making course of a full document-dump would reveal, and doesn’t suppose it’d be all that damning.
Whereas Dorsey talks quite a bit about how he thinks transparency and moderation ought to work in his submit, it’s potential 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 remedy something,” however Dorsey’s description doesn’t fairly describe how unhealthy issues have been. CNN reported on Monday that former head of belief and security Yoel Roth needed to depart his dwelling 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 baby trafficking on the platform.
The Twitter Information posts have additionally been damaging in different methods — in a couple of cases, incomplete censoring leaked contact data 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 stated he was liable for Musk’s preliminary wave of mass layoffs, saying they had been mandatory 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 totally walked again that assertion but, he has challenged a few of Musk’s statements outdoors of his newest submit.
Dorsey’s submit 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 ideas 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 engaged on a decentralized social media protocol known as Bluesky, which will get a number of mentions within the submit, alongside the founder’s concepts of how social media ought to work (which he says he wasn’t in a position to implement at Twitter as a result of its standing as a public firm). His tenets contain maintaining 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 (someway) not use one in any respect.
One notably eyebrow-raising assertion from Dorsey reads “any content material produced by somebody for the web must be everlasting till the unique creator chooses to delete it,” including that “content material takedowns and suspensions shouldn’t be potential.” He does admit that stance might create “important points” in the case of issues like “criminality” (what occurs when this stance collides with somebody posting baby sexual abuse materials, or revenge porn?), however says that the perfect would “permit for much higher options than now we have at present.”