Jack Dorsey defended Twitter’s decision to ban US President Donald Trump’s account but said that the Internet might learn a lesson from Bitcoin.
Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has issued a statement in which he defended the social media’s decision to ban the account of US President Donald Trump.
Interestingly, the executive also took a moment to praise bitcoin’s decentralized nature, saying that the Internet should strive to be more like it.
The History Of Trump’s Social Media Bans
News broke last week when multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, permanently suspended the account of the still active US President Donald Trump.
Twitter’s decision arguably hurt Trump the most as it was his favorite platform to spread his views and opinions. However, Jack Dorsey’s social media giant found two particular tweets as extremely inappropriate – calling the supporters that broke into the US Capitol “patriots” and saying that he wouldn’t go to the presidential inauguration on January 20th, 2020.
Twitter said that such statements violated the company’s Glorification of Violence Policy, and “the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.”
This decision received a fair portion of controversy. Some claimed that social media platforms have too much power and questioned the ban, while others asserted that the suspension was the right way to go.
Dorsey Speaks: The Trump Ban Was The Right Decision
Earlier today, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, offered his views on the matter. He wrote that he didn’t “celebrate or feel pride” following the ban but said that the company made the decision “with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter.”
Dorsey reaffirmed his stance once more, saying that this was the correct decision as the platform faced “an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety.”
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
The executive admitted that banning an account has “real and significant ramifications” as it represents a “failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation.” Moreover, he acknowledged the division created after the account suspension and warned that this precedent is dangerous.
The Internet Needs To Be More Like Bitcoin
Although Dorsey refuted the allegations that all social media platforms that banned Trump’s accounts acted together, he admitted that some individuals or corporations could have too much power at times.
While this particular moment had called for this “dynamic” decision, such actions could be “destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet” over the long term.
“A company making a business decision to moderate itself is different from a government removing access, yet can feel much the same.”
As such, Dorsey believes that such large Internet corporations need “more transparency” in their moderation operations. Furthermore, he breached Bitcoin as the model the Internet has to follow:
“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.”
It’s worth noting that Dorsey is a long-time BTC supporter. Apart from his other company, Square, allocating $50 million in the asset, his personal Twitter profile continues to display only one word – “#bitcoin.”
