Jack Dorsey on Musk’s Twitter Files: ‘There’s Nothing to Hide’

Jack Dorsey Responded To Elon Musk’s Alleged Exposing Known As ‘The Twitter Files,’ And He Did in an essay that is fortunately not written as a Twitter thread. In it, the co-founder and former CEO of the social network says he believes the company has nothing to hide, contrary to how the files were presented. He also says he wishes the information had been “released Wikileaks style” and asks the internet not to sue Twitter employees for perceived slights. Of course, his article also promotes his own social networking protocol and Bitcoin.

Dorsey’s response comes after Elon Musk spent more than a week promoting five selective document released known as Twitter files, which show internal documents, Slack logs and emails regarding things like Twitter’s removal of Donald Trump after the January 6 riots, moderation of “blacklists” and how the site handled information on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The threads, and their promotion by Musk, have largely taken on a conspiratorial tone, portraying former Twitter leadership and employees as colluding with the government to silence Twitter users.

Dorsey clearly disagrees, saying in his post that “mistakes were made” on Twitter, but he believes the company had “no ill intent or hidden agenda, and that everyone acted on the best information we had at the time.”

Later in the post, Dorsey questions how the files were given to specific journalists who then published excerpts and reported on them. “I still wish Twitter and every company would become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions,” Dorsey writes, adding that he wishes the files had “many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” This is an interesting request, as he is essentially asking for receipts for his own business, as my colleague Adi Robertson described while we were discussing the article – it seems likely that Dorsey is fully aware of the sort of decision-making process that a full doc – dump would reveal, and don’t think it would be so overwhelming.

While Dorsey talks a lot about how he thinks transparency and moderation should work in his post, he may want a more transparent process as the hand-picked documents were used by Musk and others. to attack former Twitter employees. He indirectly refers to it by saying that “the current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and solve nothing”, but Dorsey’s description doesn’t quite describe how bad things have been. CNN reported on Monday this former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth had to leave his home after Musk implied he supported pedophilia in now-deleted tweets. The musk has also accused specific other former Twitter employees to do nothing to stop child trafficking on the platform.

Twitter Files posts have also been damaging in other ways – in a few cases, incomplete censorship leaked contact information for politicians, Twitter employees and Dorsey himself.

This isn’t the first time Dorsey has apologized for what happened after he quit Twitter — last month he said he was responsible for Musk’s first wave collective redundancies, saying they were needed because he had grown the company too quickly. Earlier this year, Dorsey said he believed Musk was the “one size fits all” he trusted to run Twitter as a business and said he trusted Musk’s “mission to expand the light of consciousness”. Although he does not seem to have fully reconsidered this statement yet, he challenged a some of Musk’s statements apart from his last post.

Dorsey’s post isn’t entirely about Twitter. He also uses it to announce that he’s donating $1 million a year to encrypted messaging app Signal and asks for suggestions on other grants he should give in the areas of “social media and communication protocols.” private communication, bitcoin and a web-only mobile operating system”. .”

Dorsey himself is also working on a decentralized social media protocol called Bluesky, which gets several mentions in the post, alongside the founder’s ideas for how social media should work (which he says he couldn’t implement on Twitter due to his corporate status public). Its principles involve preventing governments and corporations from influencing conversations, ensuring that moderation decisions happen on a “localized” basis, and either letting people choose their own ranking algorithms or decide (one way or another) not to use any at all.

A particularly chilling statement from Dorsey reads: “any content someone produces for the Internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to remove it,” adding that “removals and suspensions of content do not should not be possible”. He admits that this position could create “significant problems” when it comes to things like “illegal activity” (what happens when this position collides with someone posting abuse material child sex or revenge porn?), but says the ideal would “allow for much better solutions than we have today.