Jack Dorsey took the blame for the mess Elon Musk inherited at Twitter, writing in a Tuesday blog post that he took his hands off the wheel when a big investor tried to oust him from the platform he co-founded.
Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion in October, has been systematically uncovering and revealing disturbing evidence of how Twitter’s ultra-woke senior managers worked with the FBI to silence conservatives and potentially affect the 2020 presidential election. The public cleansing has confirmed the suspicions of conservatives, who had long believed they were “shadow banned” or stifled on the platform despite Dorsey’s insistence they were not.
Now Dorsey says platforms such as Twitter must resist trying to control the public conversation and rely on “algorithmic choice,” not the whims of individuals, to moderate extreme content.
“The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles,” Dorsey wrote. “This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020.”
I don't want to edit everything into 280 char chunks, so here's the rest: https://t.co/eWVwDFxq7e
— jack (@jack) December 13, 2022
The activist Dorsey referred to is believed to be the hedge fund Elliott Management, which in 2020 bought a big chunk of Twitter stock and then began trying to oust Dorsey as CEO. Dorsey finally did step down as CEO in November of 2021, more than a year after the platform had suppressed the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story and well after it banned then-President Donald Trump, despite Musk’s new revelations showing Trump had not explicitly violated any of Twitter’s rules.
Elliott sold off all of its stake in Twitter for a hefty profit after Musk initially agreed to buy the company in April, according to the Financial Times.
Dorsey wrote that he regretted that Twitter under his leadership tried to manage what people said on the 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,” he wrote. “This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets).”
Dorsey said that Twitter grew under him to have too much power and lamented the decision to ban Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 riots.
“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.”
