SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey 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 followers to storm the U.S. Chapter last week, and then went on to send potentially ominous messages, Dorsey said the resulting public safety risk created an “extraordinary and unbearable circumstance” for the company. After already briefly suspending Trump’s account on the day of the Capitol riot, Twitter banned Trump altogether on Friday, then thwarted the president’s attempts to send a tweet using other accounts.
“I’m not celebrating and I’m not proud that we have to ban @realDonaldTrump on Twitter,” Dorsey wrote. But he added: “I think this was the right decision for Twitter.”
Dorsey acknowledged that demonstrations of force such as 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 making such decisions in the first place. Exactly how this would work is unclear, although it could range from earlier and more effective moderation to a fundamental restructuring of social networks.
In Dorsey-speak, this means that Twitter needs to work harder to “promote a healthy conversation.”
Extreme measures, such as a Trump ban, also highlight the extraordinary power that Twitter and other Big Tech companies can wield without liability 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 him access to app stores and cloud hosting services. The companies accused Parler of not being aggressive enough about eliminating calls for violence, which Parler denied.
Dorsey declined to directly criticize his Big Tech counterparts, noting that “this moment may require this dynamic.” However, in the long run, he suggested that aggressive and domineering behavior could threaten the “noble purpose and ideals” of the open internet by strengthening the power of several organizations over a common good that should be accessible to all.
The Twitter co-founder, however, had little to say about how his platform or other Big Tech companies could avoid such choices in the future. Instead, he came up with 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 by Facebook and Twitter.
But for now, Dorsey wrote, Twitter’s goal “is to disarm as much as we can and make sure we all build toward greater common understanding and a more peaceful existence on earth.”