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Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s Mistakes Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s Mistakes
(about 3 hours later)
Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Andy Mills and Rachel Quester, and edited by Lisa Tobin. This episode of “The Daily” was hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Andy Mills and Rachel Quester, and edited by Lisa Tobin.
This article was written by Lauren Jackson and Desiree Ibekwe.
Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via StitcherListen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via Stitcher
It’s been four years since the 2016 election laid bare the powerful role that social media companies have come to play in shaping political discourse and beliefs in America. “Do you believe that you are one of the most powerful people on Earth right now?”
Since then, there have been growing calls to address the spread of polarization and misinformation promoted on such platforms. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s C.E.O., was quick to deflect. “No,” he laughed. “Everything that has made Twitter powerful has come from the people using it.”
While Facebook has been slower to acknowledge a need for change, Twitter has embraced the challenge, acknowledging that the company made mistakes in the past. But with three months to go until the 2020 election, these changes have been incremental, and Twitter itself is more popular than ever. That was one of the first questions that Michael asked Mr. Dorsey in a wide-ranging interview on the role of his platform in shaping public discourse and beliefs in America. The conversation that followed probed the limits, dangers and responsibilities of that role — revealing just how complicated the struggle against misinformation and polarization on social media can be.
Today, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s C.E.O., discusses the platform’s flaws, its polarizing potential — and his vision for the future. In the four years since the 2016 election revealed social media’s role in the American electoral process, governments around the world have grappled with how to regulate the scale and scope of tech giants. Some social networks, like Facebook, have been slower to acknowledge a need for change, but Twitter has embraced the challenge, acknowledging that the company made mistakes in the past. Still, Twitter itself is divided over how to design products and policies that assign visibility to users working in the public interest.
With three months to go until the 2020 election, we asked Mr. Dorsey to reflect on his regrets and on his platform’s flaws — and on what he hopes to change as he forges a new path for his company.
Twitter was founded without a plan, Mr. Dorsey said. “It wasn’t something we really invented, it was something we discovered. And we kept pulling the thread on it.”
The unraveling was “electric,” he said, as the small, localized platform he built for friends to share updates on their lives morphed into a global social network. In the process, though, Mr. Dorsey said he now believes that he made a critical mistake: not hiring experts to help him understand the potentially far-reaching importance of apparently small design choices.
“The disciplines that we were lacking in the company in the early days, that I wish we would have understood and hired for,” he said, were “a game theorist to just really understand the ramifications of tiny decisions that we make, such as what happens with retweet versus retweet with comment and what happens when you put a count next to a like button?”
Without this expertise, he said he thought that the company had built incentives into the app that encouraged users and media outlets to write tweets and headlines that appealed to sensationalism instead of accuracy. At the time, he noted, he struggled to envision the app’s potential social implications — and what those design decisions might mean for “how people interrelate with one another, how people converse with one another.”
Still, he said he believed that his company had played a correlative, not a causal role in shaping public discourse — amplifying trends that existed “in parallel” to the platform.
”Abuse and harassment did not start after this polarization or the political dialogue coming on Twitter,” he said. “It’s been on the internet forever.”
Mr. Dorsey said that he, and his company, intended to learn from past mistakes.
“It would be silly for us not to change Twitter,” he said. To Mr. Dorsey, the company “should become irrelevant if it doesn’t change, if it doesn’t constantly evolve and if it doesn’t recognize gaps and opportunities to get better.”
He said he also hoped to build that openness, and admission of wrongdoing, into the platform’s discourse. “It’s important that we continue to allow the space for people to express their past and their history in context,” he said, responding to the critique that Twitter, with its limited character count and incentives for pith, promotes intolerance.
“If we can’t express that, we can’t learn from it, and then we can’t really progress,” he said, “or improve as a culture, or as individuals either.”
To do this, Mr. Dorsey said that he was considering alterations to how Twitter worked. In some iterations of the platform’s algorithm, he said, “the most salacious or controversial tweets will naturally rise to the top because those are the things that people naturally click on or share without thinking about it or reply to.”
Solving this issue, he said, requires demystifying the code that governs social networks — an issue the industry has generally shied away from. “They are way too much of a black box,” he said.
“We need to open up and be transparent around how our algorithms work and how they’re used, and maybe even enable people to choose their own algorithms to rank the content or to create their own algorithms, to rank it. To be that open, I think, would be pretty incredible.”
Since he first sat behind the Resolute Desk, iPhone in hand, President Trump has reshaped the presidency — and the nation — with the help of more than 11,000 tweets. His account is a forum for early-morning musings, personal vendettas and off-the-cuff policy decisions. The platform has also facilitated digital connections between the president and extremists, impostors and spies.
While Mr. Dorsey acknowledged that President Trump had leveraged Twitter’s algorithms to create visibility “to great effect,” he challenged the assertion that Twitter gave the president an unmediated platform to share his views — and misinformation.
“I think it’s important that we do recognize, number one, that these annotations are happening by the crowd in real time all the time,” he said, noting that through replies, comments and retweets with added context, users around the world have the opportunity to qualify, challenge or engage with the president.
However, he said he did believe that there were particular areas in which Twitter had a responsibility to intervene — specifically with regard to language that encourages violence or voter suppression or that challenges electoral integrity.
Twitter has recently risked provoking Mr. Trump’s ire after placing some of the president’s tweets behind a warning label saying that they violated the company’s policies forbidding abusive behavior. Mr. Dorsey said that the platform was working to make the decision-making process about when to apply such warnings “as tight as possible” and that he hoped to “make those interventions as infrequent as possible.”
Still, he added, the company “won’t hesitate” to take action on accounts that violate Twitter’s terms of service.
Background reading:Background reading:
A 17-year-old in Florida was recently responsible for one of the worst hacking attacks in Twitter’s history — successfully breaching the accounts of some of the world’s most famous people, including Barack Obama, Kanye West and Elon Musk. But did the teenager do the country a favor?A 17-year-old in Florida was recently responsible for one of the worst hacking attacks in Twitter’s history — successfully breaching the accounts of some of the world’s most famous people, including Barack Obama, Kanye West and Elon Musk. But did the teenager do the country a favor?
Twitter is in hot water with the government for sharing with advertisers phone numbers given to the company for personal security purposes.Twitter is in hot water with the government for sharing with advertisers phone numbers given to the company for personal security purposes.
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“The Daily” is made by Theo Balcomb, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever. Liz O. Baylen and Asthaa Chaturvedi. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani and Nora Keller. “The Daily” is made by Theo Balcomb, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever. Liz O. Baylen and Asthaa Chaturvedi. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller and Desiree Ibekwe.