Jack Dorsey

J

ack Dorsey is a cofounder and CEO of Twitter, and a founder and CEO of Square. Dorsey has faced a lot of attention in recent years as a spokesperson for some of Twitter’s major ethics debates, such as when he testified to the US Congress, his meeting with Trump in the White House, and when he shared Twitter’s decision to ban political ads on the platform.

Jack Dorsey

Birthname	Jack Patrick Dorsey
Date of Birth	November 19, 1976
Birth Place	St. Louis, Missouri, U.S
Nationality	American
Occupation	Web Developer, Entrepreneur
Biography	Best known as the CEO and Co-Founder of Twitter and CEO and Founder of Square

Twitter's Abuse and Harassment Problem

When Jack Dorsey came up with the idea of "Twttr." in 2006, his focus was on the ability for people to share their “status” with others. Many basic decisions that Dorsey and other engineers made with the site in its creation are ones that he regrets today due to their impact now that the site is at such a large scale. “If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much,” he said. “I don’t think I would even create ‘like’ in the first place, because it doesn’t actually push what we believe now to be the most important thing, which is healthy contribution back to the network and conversation to the network, participation within conversation, learning something from the conversation.”

To eliminate these aspects of followers and likes would be to eliminate some of Twitter’s main engagement metrics that have become very important to the platform. The emphasis on these metrics fosters an environment that rewards scenarios of accounts being followed by large numbers of bots, or high levels of replies to a tweet, even if the replies are harassment rather than “healthy conversation”. "We have seen abuse, we have seen harassment, we have seen manipulation, automation, human coordination, misinformation," Dorsey said. "These are dynamics that we were not expecting 13 years ago." Dorsey admits that the scale of the problem is large, and that fixing it will involve systemic change, but to make these changes is a risky move for the success of the company.

Jack Dorsey has also said that Twitter’s system for reporting harassment asks too much of victims, and he hopes it will be able to more heavily rely on machine learning to identify abusive tweets so the people being harassed don’t have to.

Testimony to Congress

In 2018, Jack Dorsey testified before the US congress, alongside Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg. During the testimony, Dorsey responded to accusations by Republicans that conservative accounts were being shadow banned (de-emphasized in search results by the platform). He denied these accusations, explaining that “from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.”

Dorsey also admitted problems with Twitter’s verification system. The “blue check mark” system that was originally intended to simply confirm identity has become a status symbol on the site that is seen as an endorsement of a verified account’s views even if that is not what Twitter intended it to be.

Meeting with Donald Trump

Dorsey meeting with Trump at the White House

In April 2019, Jack Dorsey met with Donald Trump in the White House after Trump’s complaints that Twitter was being discriminatory against him as a Republican for removing many of his followers during a purge of fake profiles. In the same purge, Dorsey himself lost around 200,000 followers. While the contents of the meeting are not available to the public, Trump shared in a tweet that they discussed “lots of subjects...regarding their platform, and the world of social media in general."

Ban on Political Ads

In October 2019, Dorsey announced Twitter’s decision to ban political ads from the platform. "A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money," he said.

This announcement followed criticism of Facebook for not taking down political ads with lies in them. To Zuckerberg, Dorsey commented “This isn't about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle."

Dorsey’s Future Plans

Recently, the hedge fund Elliott Management bought a large stake in Twitter and may be looking to remove him from the CEO position due to concerns about his split focus between Twitter and Square. Earlier this year, Dorsey announced plans to move to Africa. “Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!). Not sure where yet, but I’ll be living here for 3-6 months mid 2020,” he tweeted. “I think he is definitely looking at the opportunity to get more people to adopt payments on Bitcoin, buying Bitcoin with Square here” thinks Adeoye Ojo, CEO of SureRemit, an African crypto-currency startup.