Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorseyexpressed regret this week for the 2021 permanent suspension of then-President Donald Trump from the social media platform.

“The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves,” Dorsey wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

“This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure,” he added, echoing what many have said about the company both prior to and in the wake of the recent Twitter Files revelations brought about by new CEO Elon Musk.

Dorsey gave the banning of a national leader as an example of how corporations are becoming too powerful in the world.

“I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account,” he wrote. “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.”

Indeed, at the time, Dorsey stood by the ban, which came after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump was reinstated on Twitter by Musk, to huge public outcry and outside pressure on Twitter and its advertisers from interested groups.

“I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?” he tweeted in January of 2021 on the subject, but added that he believed it was “the right decision for Twitter.”

His blog post this week addresses his 2021 comments, to an extent.

“I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time. Of course mistakes were made,” he wrote Tuesday. “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). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right.”

Dorsey lamented that Twitter today isn’t what he’d hoped for or reflective of his values, and blamed himself.

“The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020,” he wrote without saying who the activist was. “I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.”

Dorsey advocated for freedom of expression and denounced censorship.

Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.

I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today. The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.

Dorsey wrote that content moderation “can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better.”

The post Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Expresses Regret Over Banning Trump, Other Moderation Choices first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/Jfl45Zm