Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has accepted the blame for the company’s failures, declaring “this is my fault.”
Writing in a Tuesday blog post, Dorsey took responsibility for the mess that new boss Elon Musk inherited at Twitter.
Dorsey says that he took his hands off the wheel when a big investor tried to oust him from the social media company that he co-founded.
Musk, who took over the company in late October after buying it for $44 billion, has been exposing disturbing evidence of Twitter’s censorship practices.
The “Twitter Files” has revealed how Twitter’s ultra-woke senior managers worked with the FBI to silence conservatives and potentially affect the 2020 presidential election.
The public cleansing has confirmed the suspicions of conservatives, who had long believed they were “shadow-banned” or stifled on the platform.
However, Dorsey has always insisted that they were not.
Dorsey even testified before Congress to claim that conservatives were not “shadow-banned” by Twitter, which has now been confirmed to be false.
Now Dorsey says platforms such as Twitter must resist trying to control the public conversation and rely on “algorithmic choice.”
He says that the whims of individuals should not be used to moderate extreme content.
“The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles,” Dorsey wrote.
“This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020.”
I don't want to edit everything into 280 char chunks, so here's the rest: https://t.co/eWVwDFxq7e
— jack (@jack) December 13, 2022
The investor that Dorsey refers to is believed to be the hedge fund Elliott Management.
In 2020, the firm bought a big chunk of Twitter stock and then began trying to oust Dorsey as CEO.
Dorsey finally did step down as CEO in November of 2021.
His resignation came more than a year after the platform had suppressed the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story and well after it banned then-President Donald Trump.
Among Musk’s new revelations is evidence that shows Trump had not explicitly violated any of Twitter’s rules.
Twitter’s former executives changed the company’s policy and twisted hidden meaning into Trump’s posts that didn’t exist so they could justify banning the sitting president.
Elliott sold off all of its stake in Twitter for a hefty profit after Musk initially agreed to buy the company in April, according to the Financial Times.
Dorsey wrote that he regretted that Twitter tried to manage what people said on the platform under his leadership.
“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,” he wrote.
“This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets).”
Dorsey said that, under his leadership, Twitter grew to have too much power and lamented the decision to ban Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 riots.
“I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account,” he wrote.
“As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society.”
