With Elon Musk‘s acquisition of Twitter, a fundamental discussion has begun about the direction of the short messaging platform. Musk has argued that Twitter was clearly too left-wing and thus positioned itself politically. The moderation would also have been correspondingly left-wing. Jack Dorsey (@Jack), Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO, has taken a public stand and admitted to structural problems and personal mistakes. He advocates a native Internet protocol for social media.
Free And Open Social Media
Jack said that he firmly believes that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible because doing so would complicate important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity.
Jack continued to say that he does not believe that a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms that must not be controlled by a company or government. Instead, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria or not have to use any at all.
He advocates a free and open protocol for social media that is not owned by a single company or group of companies and is resilient to corporate and government influence.
Financial Support For Developers
Jack will be giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS to accelerate open internet and protocol work. He would start with $1mm per year to Signal.
