SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended President Donald Trump’s ban on his company on a philosophical topic on Twitter that is his first public statement on the subject.
When Trump urged his followers to break into the U.S. Capitol last week and continued to tweet potentially threatening messages, Dorsey said the resulting public security risk created an “extraordinary and unsustainable circumstance” for the company. Having already briefly suspended Trump’s account on the day of the Capitol rebellion, Twitter banned Trump entirely on Fridaythen cracked down on the president’s attempts to tweet using other accounts.
“I don’t celebrate or feel proud that we have to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter,” wrote Dorsey. But he added, “I believe that was the right decision for Twitter.”
Dorsey acknowledged that displays of strength like Trump’s ban could set dangerous precedents, even calling them a sign of “failure”. Although not in so many words, Dorsey suggested that Twitter needs to find ways to avoid having to make such decisions in the first place. Exactly how this would work is unclear, although it can range from earlier and more effective moderation to a fundamental restructuring of social networks.
In Dorsey’s language, this means that Twitter needs to work harder to “promote healthy conversation”.
Extreme measures, such as banning Trump, also highlight the extraordinary power that Twitter and other big tech companies can exercise without responsibility or recourse, Dorsey wrote.
While Twitter struggled with the Trump problem, for example, Apple, Google and Amazon were effectively shutting down the right-wing website Parler denying you access to app stores and cloud hosting services. The companies accused Parler of not being aggressive enough to remove calls for violence, which Parler denied.
Dorsey refused to directly criticize his colleagues at Big Tech, even noting that “this moment may require this dynamic”. In the long run, however, he suggested that aggressive and dominating behavior could threaten the “purpose and noble ideals” of the open Internet by consolidating the power of some organizations over a common good that should be accessible to everyone.
The Twitter co-founder, however, had little specific information to say 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 centralized control of companies like Facebook and Twitter.
But for now, Dorsey wrote, Twitter’s goal “is to disarm as much as we can and ensure that we are all building towards greater common understanding and a more peaceful existence on Earth.”