In a shock turn-around, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said he agrees with Elon Musk that the decision to ban former president Trump was wrong and should be reversed.
As Musk makes the final arrangements for his $44bn. take-over of the social media giant, Twitter’s former chief, notorious lefty, Jack Dorsey, has seemed to thaw to Musk.
In April, as Musk engaged in an online spat with the Twitter board – of which Dorsey is still a member until his contract expires later this month – Dorsey seemed to love-bomb Musk and supported his criticism of the board:
“Good boards don’t create good companies, but a bad board will kill a company every time,” he posted to Twitter as the board attempted to block Musk’s bids for complete control.
“I’m really happy Elon is joining the Twitter board! He cares deeply about our world and Twitter’s role in it,” Dorsey posted in another Tweet.
Now, as Twitter’s founder supposedly prepares to leave Twitter completely, Dorsey has backed Musk’s proposal to over-ride the decision to permanently ban Trump’s Twitter account after his supporters raided the Capitol Building in January 2021.
Yesterday, Musk made it clear that he thought the ban was a “morally bad decision and foolish in the extreme”, adding “I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump”.
In a shock revelation, Dorsey, who was CEO of the company when Trump was banned, said he agrees with Musk:
“I do agree,” Dorsey Tweeted, adding that in his view, most perma-bans do not work:
“There are exceptions (CSE, illegal behavior, spam or network manipulation, etc.), but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work, which I wrote about here after the event (and called for a resilient social media protocol).”
At the time of the ban, Dorsey defended the decision to remove Trump, stating that Twitter felt the former president had incited violence, although notably and hypocritically, Twitter chiefs did not take the same approach after Biden publicly backed the BLM protests which resulted in rioting, arson, looting and even murders in the summer of 2021.
“I believe this was the right decision for Twitter”, posted Dorsey after banning Trump.
“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.”
But on Tuesday, Dorsey made it clear that he now had second thoughts about the decision. Speaking to Axio’s business director, Dan Primack, Dorsey said the ban was, “a business decision, it shouldn’t have been”.
it was a business decision, it shouldn’t have been. and we should always revisit our decisions and evolve as necessary. I stated in that thread and still believe that permanent bans of individuals are directionally wrong.
— jack⚡️ (@jack) May 10, 2022
“And we should always revisit our decisions and evolve as necessary. I stated in that thread and still believe that permanent bans of individuals are directionally wrong”.
Meanwhile, it’s unclear as to whether Donald Trump would return to Twitter regardless of his account being reinstated. The former president has set up a social media platform of his own called Truth Social. He told Fox last month: “I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH”.
This story syndicated with permission from Jo Marney, Author at Trending Politics
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