Ex-Twitter CEO responsible for social network's political censorship
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A special team was instructed to "build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics."
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, November 12, 2018 (Reuters)
Former CEO and co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey took responsibility Wednesday for the company's susceptibility to government and corporate influence.
"Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. Only the original author may remove content they produce. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today 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," he wrote in his personal blog.
Dorsey noted that he realized companies have become "far too powerful" once Twitter suspended the account of former US President Donald Trump in January 2021.
His mistake was investing in the development of tools allowing the company "to manage the public conversation," instead of "building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves," Dorsey added.
"Burdened the company with too much power" and made it susceptible to "outside pressure," according to the former CEO.
US billionaire Elon Musk, Twitter's new owner, has reportedly given access to internal papers to a few independent journalists to investigate politically-motivated censorship in the company before his takeover. Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi presented their findings in thread tweets earlier this month.
Read next: TWITTER FILES: James Woods furious on explicit Hunter post censorship
Weiss said Twitter allegedly used to have a special team instructed to "build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics."
Taibbi alleged that before the 2020 US presidential elections, Twitter deliberately took measures to downplay the scandal around the laptop of US President Joe Biden's son Hunter. Reports suggested that the laptop had evidence of Hunter Biden’s participation in tax-related crimes, drug use, money laundering, and illegal business dealings in foreign countries, including Ukraine and China.
