Jack Dorsey Explains The Difficult Decision To Ban Donald Trump; Reiterates Support For Turning Twitter Into A Decentralized Protocol
Last Friday, Twitter made the decision to permanently ban Donald Trump from its platform, which I wrote about at the time, explaining that it's not an easy decision, but neither is it an unreasonable one. On Wednesday, Jack Dorsey put out an interesting Twitter thread in which he discusses some of the difficulty in making such a decision. This is good to see. So much of the content moderation debate often is told in black and white terms, in which many people act as if one answer is "obvious" and any other thing is crazy. And part of the reason for that is many of these decisions are made behind close doors, and no one outside gets to see the debates, or how much the people within the company explore the trade-offs and nuances inherent in one of these decisions.
Jack doesn't go into that much detail, but enough to explain that the company felt that, given the wider context of everything that happened last week, it absolutely made sense to put in place the ban now, even as the company's general stance and philosophy has always pushed back on such an approach. In short, context matters:
I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.
- jack (@jack) January 14, 2021
Here's his thread in plaintext:
I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we'd take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?
I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.
That said, having to ban an account has real and significant ramifications. While there are clear and obvious exceptions, I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation. And a time for us to reflect on our operations and the environment around us. Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.
The check and accountability on this power has always been the fact that a service like Twitter is one small part of the larger public conversation happening across the internet. If folks do not agree with our rules and enforcement, they can simply go to another internet service. This concept was challenged last week when a number of foundational internet tool providers also decided not to host what they found dangerous. I do not believe this was coordinated. More likely: companies came to their own conclusions or were emboldened by the actions of others. This moment in time might call for this dynamic, but over the long term it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet. A company making a business decision to moderate itself is different from a government removing access, yet can feel much the same.
Yes, we all need to look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement. Yes, we need to look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm. Yes, we need more transparency in our moderation operations. All this can't erode a free and open global internet.
I fear that many will miss the important nuances that Jack is explaining here, but there are a few overlapping important points. The context and the situation dictated that this was the right move for Twitter -- and I think there's clear support for that argument. However, it does raise some questions about how the open internet itself functions. If anything, this tweet-thread reminds me of when Cloudlflare removed the Daily Stormer from its service, and the company's CEO, Matthew Prince highlighted that, while the move was justified for a wide variety of reasons, he felt uncomfortable that he had that kind of power.
At the time, Prince called for a wider discussion on these kinds of issues -- and unfortunately those discussions didn't really happen. And so, we're back in a spot where we need to have them again.
The second part of Jack's thread highlights how Twitter is actually working to remove that power from its own hands. As he announced at the end of 2019, he is exploring a protocol-based approach that would make the Twitter system an open protocol standard, with Twitter itself just one implementation. This was based, in part, on my paper on this topic. Here's what Jack is saying now:
The reason I have so much passion for #Bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be. We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it @bluesky.
This will take time to build. We are in the process of interviewing and hiring folks, looking at both starting a standard from scratch or contributing to something that already exists. No matter the ultimate direction, we will do this work completely through public transparency. I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this. I also recognize it does not feel that way today. Everything we learn in this moment will better our effort, and push us to be what we are: one humanity working together.
There had been some concern recently that, since nothing was said about the Bluesky project in 2020, Twitter had abandoned it. That is not at all true. There have been discussions (disclaimer: I've been involved in some of those discussions) about how best to approach it and who would work on it. In the fall, a variety of different proposals were submitted for Twitter to review and choose a direction to head in. I've seen the proposals -- and a few have been mentioned publicly. I've been waiting for Twitter to release all of the proposals publicly to talk about them, which I hope will happen soon.
Still, it's interesting to see how the latest debates may lead to finally having this larger discussion about how the internet works, and how it should be managed. While I'm sure Jack will be getting some criticism (because that's the nature of the internet), I appreciate that his approach to this, like Matthew's at Cloudflare, is to recognize his own discomfort with his own power, and to explore better ways of going about things. I wish I could say the same for all internet CEOs.