Twitter founder Jack Dorsey wrote in a blog about his plans to give a $1 million per year grant to the encrypted messaging app Signal as a part of his ongoing effort to foster "open internet development" and robust social media platforms. In the same blog, Dorsey acknowledged that "mistakes were made" during his tenure at Twitter and criticized the current state of the platform, without calling out current-CEO Elon Musk by name.
On Twitter-owned newsletter site Revue, Dorsey laid out three key principles for social media companies: that social media companies should resist government and corporate control, that content should remain on the internet unless its removed by the original author, and that users should be able to choose the type of moderation they experience via a set of moderation algorithms.
According to Dorsey, Twitter has yet to live up to those principles. The platform's former CEO said that the team had focused too much on establishing ways for the company to control online conversations without spending enough time empowering users to control their conversations themselves.
As Twitter built up its control over public discussion, Dorsey says advertisers began to have increasing influence over the company's actions, specifically pointing to the ban of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
"I generally think companies have become far too powerful," Dorsey wrote, "and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump's account. 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."
"I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time," Dorsey continued.
When activist investors got involved with Twitter in 2020, Dorsey says that he gave up trying to make positive changes at the company, ultimately deciding to leave.
Along with calling for social media companies to be more "resilient" to outside influences, Dorsey also argued that removing content from the internet "complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity." While acknowledging that this practice would come with its challenges, Dorsey still claimed that following this principle would be "a far better solution" than current moderation tactics.
"The internet is trending towards a world where storage is 'free' and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content," Dorsey wrote.
In a world with infinite internet storage, Dorsey suggests that users should be able to control the content moderation on their feeds themselves, rather than allowing a government or company to cater the feeds for them.
In order to meet his three key principles, social media needs to operate under a "free and open protocol", says Dorsey, meaning the platform shouldn't be owned by a company or group of companies.
The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content," writes Dorsey. "Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what's available and seen, or not."
Instead or capitalizing on the conversation itself, companies should offer services that "complement" users' social media experience, according to Dorsey. In the meantime, he says that companies like Twitter need to "become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions."
Finally, Dorsey announced a new series of grants to be given "to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS," with Signal as the first recipient.
