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Jack Dorsey seeks redemption for failures, Twitter followers not buying it, push back hard

April 30, 2022 | | Print Article

It’s a crazy time on Twitter and, while Liberals are convinced the sale of the platform to Elon Musk will lead to the end of democracy, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey chose this moment for some less-than-honest self-reflection via a lengthy thread that is getting him blasted by blue check users who aren’t buying his backpedaling confessions.

“I have tried taking a break from Twitter recently, but I must say: the company has always tried to do its best given the information it had,” Dorsey tweeted Friday. “Every decision we made was ultimately my responsibility*. In the cases we were wrong or went too far, we admitted it and worked to correct.”

Note the caveat on “responsibility.”

“Some things can be fixed immediately, and others require rethinking and reimplementing the entire system,” Dorsey continued. “It is important to me that we get critical feedback in all of its forms, but also important that we get the space and time to address it. All of that should be done publicly.”

Dorsey went on to discuss the importance of transparency and trust — two things longtime Twitter users, particularly conservative, Trump-voting users, will tell you eroded from the platform the moment then-presidential candidate  Donald Trump came gliding down that escalator.

“A transparent system, both in policy and operations, is the right way to earn trust,” Dorsey said. “Whether it’s owned by a company or an open protocol doesn’t matter _as much as_ deliberately deciding to be open about every decision and why it was made. It’s not easy to do, but it must happen.”

“Doing this work means you’re in the arena. Nothing that is said now matters,” Dorsey stated. “What matters is how the service works and acts, and how quickly it learns and improves. My biggest failing was that quickness part. I’m confident that part at least is being addressed, and will be fixed.”

Dorsey was about to discover just how much what “is said now” actually does matter to users, but first, that caveat:

“*It’s also crazy and wrong that individuals or companies bear this responsibility,” Dorsey added. “As I’ve said before, I don’t believe any permanent ban (with the exception of illegal activity) is right, or should be possible. This is why we need a protocol that’s resilient to the layers above.”


Okay, Jack. But first, some of that “critical feedback” you were talking about, because, trust and believe, Twitter users have some thoughts.

“Recovering journalist” Beth Baumann said Dorsey’s actions were “too little too late.”

“You ‘corrected’ the decision to ban @nypost’s account and keep people from tweeting their story about Hunter’s laptop,” she replied. “But it was too little to late. You influenced the election. Twitter should have NEVER played gatekeeper with information that ended up being factually correct.”

To which Dorsey replied, “[W]hen I found out we took that action, we reversed it almost immediately. [W]e should have also reinstated the account without requiring a delete of the tweet.”

And that’s about the time Twitter blue checks lost it.

“Two weeks is NOT ‘almost immediately,” Baumann shot back, noting that “the link to the story couldn’t be shared without people being suspended.”

Syndicated talk show host Joe Pags Pagliarulo chimed in, calling Dorsey a straight-up liar.

“Just so we’re clear — @Jack is lying here,” he stated. They didn’t just suspend the account and put it back up when they realized their mistake. They also stopped users here from sharing a link to the story ON the public platform AND in DMs. Not sure what his game is here.”

“This is patently untrue,” Pagliarulo said in a separate tweet. “The ghost and shadow banning has not been corrected. The suspending people for giving scientific and medical information into COVID treatments has not been rectified. The alleged mistake of suspending the @nypost just in time to affect an election, etc.”

 

Australian journalist Rita Panahi isn’t “buying it,” either.

“What?” she exclaimed. “You were CEO, how did it take you two weeks to know you’d banned not only NY Post’s account but banned all your users from sharing their Biden files stories. You deleted all shared copies too. Sorry. Not buying it.”

New York Post journalist and author of “Laptop From Hell” Miranda Devine just wants Dorsey to come clean.

“C’mon @jack,” she tweeted. “You locked the @nypost account for 2 weeks before the 2020 election over a truthful story which your censorship hacks labeled ‘hacked material’ based on zero evidence. If you mean well, as it seems, just admit you lost control of your creation and explain how and who.”

Media analyst Mark Dice called out Dorsey for Twitter’s ban of popular (and effective) meme-maker @CarpeDonktum, banned for being liked by President Trump.

“You never processed @CarpeDonktum’s counter claims to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) he got over a meme he made, even after a judge threw out the case against him,” Dice stated. “You didn’t work to correct that. He’s still banned.”

And the hits to Dorsey keep on coming, even as we write this post.

Below, find more “critical feedback.”

Be careful what you ask for, Jack…

https://twitter.com/rebeccaradfor15/status/1520257060000043009?s=20&t=DFBfj0sPvH_SZhdFhzLSkw

 

Melissa Fine
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