Current attacks on my Twitter colleagues dangerous: Jack Dorsey

NEW DELHI: Coming out in full support of his colleagues undergoing a brazen attack by Elon Musk, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said “the current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything.”

On banning former US President Donald Trump, Dorsey said he continues to believe “there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time”.

The ‘Twitter Files’ revealed by Musk implicated Vijaya Gadde, the Indian-origin former head of legal, policy and trust at the company, in suppressing Hunter Biden’s laptop story on the platform, aloft with banning Trump.

Dorsey last week challenged Musk to stop creating sensation around the ‘Twitter Files’ and make everything public instead “without filter”.

In the blog post, Dorsey said mistakes were made. “But if we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of),” he mentioned.

“Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right,” said Dorsey.

He said the biggest mistake he made was continuing to invest in building tools for them to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves.

“This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account,” said the former Twitter CEO. “As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society,” he added.

Dorsey last week challenged Musk on Twitter that “if the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without a filter and let people judge for themselves? Including all discussions around current and future actions? Make everything public now”.

Musk replied: “Most important data was hidden (from you too) and some may have been deleted, but everything we find will be released.”

Dorsey said he does not believe a centralised system can do content moderation globally. “It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localised the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all,” he emphasised.