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Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that closing US President Donald Trump’s account was the right thing to do, while signaling that it set a “dangerous precedent.”
Dorsey expressed sadness at what he described as the “extraordinary and unsustainable circumstances” surrounding Trump’s Twitter suspension.
He also said the ban was in part a failure of Twitter, which had not done enough to encourage “healthy conversation” on its platforms.
Twitter has been praised and criticized for canceling Trump’s account last Friday, days after supporters of the president stormed the United States Capitol.
Trump’s critics point to him as the instigator of the assault on the seat of the US Congress and on Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved an “indictment” against him – the second of his administration – for “incitement to the insurrection ”. Now the president faces impeachment in the Senate.
German leader Angela Merkel and Mexican President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador have spoken out against Twitter’s measure.
Previous “dangerous”
In a lengthy Twitter thread posted Wednesday night, Dorsey said he neither celebrates nor is proud of Trump’s ban.
Dorsey reiterated that the president’s removal from Twitter was made after sending him “a clear warning”.
“We made a decision with the best information we had on the basis of the physical security threats both on and off Twitter,” Dorsey said.
“The offline damage resulting from online discourse is clearly real, and this is what primarily drives our policy,” he wrote.
But also I accepted that the measure has consequences for an open and free Internet.
“Having to take these actions fragments the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for enlightenment, redemption and learning. And it sets a precedent that I think is dangerous: the power that an individual or business has over part of the global public conversation. “he stressed.
“This moment in time may demand that dynamic, but in the long run it will be destructive to the lofty goal and ideals of the open Internet,” he said.
Dorsey also spoke of criticism that only a handful of tech entrepreneurs can make decisions about who has and who doesn’t have a say on the internet, and censorship accusations.
“A business that makes the decision to moderate is different from a government that takes away (someone’s) access, but it can feel almost the same,” Dorsey said.
Prohibition on other networks
Some have criticized social media’s decision to remove accounts, posts and tweets for violating First Amendment (free speech) rights from the U.S. Constitution.
However, large tech companies often claim that being private companies and not state actors, this law does not apply when they moderate their platforms.
Facebook and YouTube They also took steps to temporarily silence the president, while Amazon shut down Talk – an app widely used by Trump supporters – on Amazon Web Services, its data storage and processing service in the United States. cloud.
Snapchat also announced that Trump would be permanently banned from its platform.
The network had already suspended him indefinitely, but on Wednesday he said that “in the interests of public safety and on the basis of his attempts to spread disinformation, incite hatred and incite violence “to permanently cancel his account.
On Monday, the spokeswoman for the German Chancellor said she found the ban on social media “problematic”. The Mexican president said: “I don’t like that no one is censored”.
US President-elect Joe Biden has said he wants companies like Facebook and Twitter to take more action to end hate speech and fake news.
Biden had previously said he wanted to repeal Section 230, a law that protects social media from being sued for things people post on their platforms.
It’s unclear how Biden wants to regulate big tech, although that’s likely one of his legislative goals.
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