Twitter Files: Founder Jack Dorsey takes blame for Twitter's 'too much power'

Twitter founder and former chief executive officer Jack Dorsey admitted his mistakes during his time at the microblogging platform stating that the Twitter of today and the Twitter he led do not meet any of these principles.

"This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one)," Dorsey wrote in a blog post.

He added that he planned his exit at that moment when he realised he was no longer right for the company.



Dorsey's admission comes soon after the release of Twitter Files - a series of leaked information detailing how Twitter muzzled free speech on its platform by restricting account activity and shadow banning of profiles.

The series of revelations spoke in particular about two incidents - one, how Twitter restricted the spread of a story on Hunter Biden (son of current US president Joe Biden) and permanently suspending the account of then US president Donald Trump in wake of the January 6 Capitol Hill riots.

"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. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets)," wrote Dorsey.

However, the former CEO believes there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information they had at the time, but mistakes were made.

Stating what Twitter should have done in the first place, he added: "If we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right."

Content moderation suggestions

Ever since Elon Musk has taken over the world's-largest microblogging platform in October, there has been a lot of discussion around how Twitter should moderate its content, particularly in terms of takedown requests from political parties and those in power.

Under Musk, Twitter is said to be leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews and favoring restrictions on distribution rather than removing certain speech outright.

This comes at a times come as researchers are reporting a surge in hate speech on the social media service, after Musk announced an amnesty for accounts suspended under the company's previous leadership that had not broken the law or engaged in "egregious spam."

The company has faced pointed questions about its ability and willingness to moderate harmful and illegal content since Musk slashed half of Twitter's staff and issued an ultimatum to work long hours that resulted in the loss of hundreds more employees.

In light of this ongoing debate, Dorsey chipped in with his suggestions as well and said he doesn't believe a centralised system can do content moderation globally.

"It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all," Dorsey commented.