Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that he believes the tech companies that have banned President Trump from using multiple social media platforms was a step that sets a dangerous precedent for free internet.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that he believes the tech companies that have banned President Trump from using multiple social media platforms was a step that sets a dangerous precedent for free internet.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
The “right decision” is what Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey described as blocking President Trump from his social media platform. But he lamented that the move was divisive and set a precedent that Dorsey said was dangerous to “the global free and open internet”.
In his series of 13 tweets, Dorsey said that the “offline damage” caused by Trump’s tweets prompted the company to expel the president from Twitter.
Twitter banned Trump following the mutiny at the Capitol last week. The company blamed a pattern of behavior that consistently violates its rules. Facebook and Snapchat followed suit and banned Trump accounts. YouTube has suspended the president for at least a week.
Dorsey insisted that the Internet should not be controlled by any individual or company. It was the first time the Twitter CEO had publicly addressed Trump’s removal from his platform. In a winding Twitter thread, he said that a decentralized alternative like Bitcoin, the digital currency, would be the best option for a free and open internet.
He referred to Bitcoin as a model that demonstrates “the foundational Internet technology in which no single individual or entity is controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity.
I am not celebrating or feeling proud of the necessity to ban Embed a Tweet From Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning about taking this action, we made a decision with the best information we have based on the threats to the physical integrity on and off Twitter. Is this true?
– Jack (@jack) January 14, 2021
Explaining his decision to ban President Trump on Twitter, he said that companies’ ability to close user accounts “would be devastating for the noble purposes and ideals of the open internet.”
He said, “This moment in time may invoke this dynamic, but in the long term it will be devastating to the lofty goal and ideals of the open internet. A company that makes a business decision to amend itself is different from a government revoking access, yet it can feel the same.”
Critics of other major social media companies believe that Big Tech, specifically Twitter and Facebook, needs more checks and balances and needs more control over malicious messages, not less.
“Appassionato pioniere della birra. Alcolico inguaribile. Geek del bacon. Drogato generale del web.”
