[ad_1]
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter defended President Donald Trump’s ban by his company in a philosophical Twitter thread which is his first public statement on the subject.
When Trump urged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol last week and then continued to tweet potentially disturbing messages, Dorsey said the resulting risk to public safety created an “extraordinary and untenable circumstance.” for the company. After briefly suspending Trump’s account on the day of the Capitol riot, Twitter banned Trump completely on Friday, then criticized the president’s attempts to tweet using other accounts.
“I’m not happy or proud to have to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter,” Dorsey wrote. But he added: “I think it was the right move for Twitter.”
Dorsey has acknowledged that shows of force like the Trump ban could set dangerous precedents, even calling them “failure.” Although not in so many words, Dorsey suggested that Twitter needs to find ways to avoid having to make such decisions in the first place. It’s unclear exactly how this would work, although it could range from an earlier and more effective moderation to a fundamental restructuring of social media.
In Dorsey-speak, that means Twitter has to work harder to “promote healthy conversation”.
Extreme measures such as the Trump ban also highlight the extraordinary power that Twitter and other big tech companies can wield without liability or recourse, Dorsey wrote.
While Twitter grappled with Trump’s problem, for example, Apple, Google, and Amazon were effectively shutting down the right-wing site Speak. by denying it access to app stores and cloud hosting services. The companies accused Parler of not being aggressive enough to suppress calls for violence, which Parler denied.
Dorsey declined to directly criticize her Big Tech counterparts, even noting that “this moment in time could call that dynamic.” In the long run, however, he suggested that aggressive and domineering behavior could threaten the “lofty goals and ideals” of the open Internet by strengthening the power of a few 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 might avoid such choices in the future. Instead, he tackled an idea that, taken literally, looks a bit like the end of Twitter itself – a long-term project to develop a technological ‘standard’ that could unleash social media. centralized control of Facebook and Twitter.
But for now, wrote Dorsey, the goal of Twitter “is to disarm as much as we can, and to ensure that we all build towards a greater common understanding and a more peaceful existence on earth.”
[ad_2]
Source link