Jack Dorsey on Musk’s Twitter information: ‘There’s nothing to cover’

Jack Dorsey has responded to Elon Musk’s purported exposé often called “The Twitter Files,” and he’s carried out so in an essay that’s mercifully not written as a Twitter thread. In it, the social community’s co-founder and former CEO says that he believes the corporate has nothing to cover, opposite to how the information have been offered. He additionally says he needs the knowledge had been “released Wikileaks-style,” and asks that the web not go after Twitter staff for perceived slights. Of course, his article additionally promotes his personal social networking protocol and Bitcoin.

Dorsey’s response comes after Elon Musk has spent over every week selling five selective document releases often called the Twitter Files, which present inside paperwork, Slack logs, and emails round issues like Twitter’s removing of Donald Trump following the January sixth riots, moderation “blacklists,” and the way the positioning handled information about Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. The threads, and Musk’s promotion of them, have largely taken on a conspiratorial tone, portray the previous Twitter management and staff as being in cahoots with the federal government to silence Twitter customers.

Dorsey clearly doesn’t agree, saying his his submit that “mistakes were made” at Twitter, however that he believes the corporate had “no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time.”

Later within the submit, Dorsey takes points with how the information have been handed over to particular journalists who then posted excerpts and reported on them. “I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions,” Dorsey writes, including that he needs the information acquired “many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” It’s an attention-grabbing request, as he’s primarily asking for receipts on his personal firm, as my co-worker Adi Robertson described whereas we have been discussing the article — it appears possible Dorsey is totally conscious of what sort of decision-making course of a full document-dump would reveal, and doesn’t suppose it’d be all that damning.

While Dorsey talks so much about how he thinks transparency and moderation ought to work in his submit, it’s doable he desires a extra clear course of as a result of the cherry-picked paperwork have been utilized by Musk and others to assault former Twitter employees. He obliquely references this by saying that “the current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything,” however Dorsey’s description doesn’t fairly describe how dangerous issues have been. CNN reported on Monday that former head of belief and security Yoel Roth needed to go away his house after Musk implied that he supported pedophilia in now-deleted tweets. Musk has also accused particular different former Twitter staff of not doing something to cease youngster trafficking on the platform.

The Twitter Files posts have additionally been damaging in different methods — in a couple of cases, incomplete censoring leaked contact information for politicians, Twitter staff, and Dorsey himself.

It’s not the primary time Dorsey has apologized for what’s occurred after he left Twitter — final month he stated he was liable for Musk’s preliminary wave of mass layoffs, saying they have been obligatory as a result of he grew the corporate too quick. Earlier this yr, Dorsey said he believed that Musk was the “singular solution” he trusted to run Twitter as an organization and stated that he trusted Musk’s “mission to extend the light of consciousness.” While he doesn’t appear to have totally walked again that assertion but, he has challenged a few of Musk’s statements exterior of his newest submit.

Dorsey’s submit isn’t totally about Twitter. He additionally makes use of it to announce that he’s giving one million {dollars} a yr to encrypted messaging app Signal and asks for options about different grants he ought to make within the areas of “social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS.”

Dorsey himself can be engaged on a decentralized social media protocol known as Bluesky, which will get a number of mentions within the submit, alongside the founder’s concepts of how social media ought to work (which he says he wasn’t capable of implement at Twitter as a result of its standing as a public firm). His tenets contain holding governments and companies from influencing conversations, ensuring that moderation choices occur on a “localized” foundation, and both letting folks select their very own rating algorithms, or deciding to (in some way) not use one in any respect.

One notably eyebrow-raising assertion from Dorsey reads “any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it,” including that “content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible.” He does admit that stance might create “significant issues” in the case of issues like “illegal activity” (what occurs when this stance collides with somebody posting youngster sexual abuse materials, or revenge porn?), however says that the best would “allow for far better solutions than we have today.”