Your Master Speaks

You may have thought that you live in a free country, a country where you have a say in who rules you. You were wrong, bunky. Your real master is a man named Jack Dorsey. I do not know whether Jack has gotten back from his French Polynesian vacation, but here he is, trying to limit the damage he caused to his stock by banning the president, for life. 

In order to defend himself for banning President Trump from Twitter he slathers on the sanctimony. Unfortunately, it ends up sounding like the mewlings of a teenager, expressing a righteous love for humanity-- whatever that is-- and a passion for bringing the world together. 

Without offering too much explanation here, I will point out that leaders who want to unite diverse nations and cultures have historically been called emperors. They answer to no one and brook no judgment.

I will also mention, because most people are too nice to do so, that much of this reads like it was written by a high school student. I have put some sentences in bold face-- and will leave it to you to ask whether they would have passed muster in a college freshman English composition class.

The text is so poorly written, the product of a mind with limited verbal skills, that you have to assume he wrote it himself. How is it possible that he cannot afford to hire someone who knows how to write in English.

I will also note, in the boldfaced text, that Jack recognizes that a lifetime ban precludes forgiveness and redemption. This is an appalling overreach. Jack feels badly about it. But Jack does it anyway. As you know, forgiveness and redemption are central to Judeo Christianity. For instance, take a look at Ezekiel 18. 

As for competitors, Jack believes that anyone can start his own social media operation and compete with Twitter. He recognizes that one of his competitors, by name of Parler, was canceled last week. This does not bother him overtly, but maybe he does not feel very good about it, because, for Jack feelings are all that matter.

And he mentions that he loves bitcoin, because it is not controlled by any nation state. He does not use the term nation, but clearly his universalist droolings are anti-nationalist. Of course, bitcoin is a bubble, an insane bubble, one that is destined to collapse.

I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?

I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.

That said, having to ban an account has real and significant ramifications. While there are clear and obvious exceptions, I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation. And a time for us to reflect on our operations and the environment around us.

Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.

The check and accountability on this power has always been the fact that a service like Twitter is one small part of the larger public conversation happening across the internet. If folks do not agree with our rules and enforcement, they can simply go to another internet service.

This concept was challenged last week when a number of foundational internet tool providers also decided not to host what they found dangerous. I do not believe this was coordinated. More likely: companies came to their own conclusions or were emboldened by the actions of others.

This moment in time might call for this dynamic, but over the long term it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet. A company making a business decision to moderate itself is different from a government removing access, yet can feel much the same.

Yes, we all need to look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement. Yes, we need to look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm. Yes, we need more transparency in our moderation operations. All this can’t erode a free and open global internet.

The reason I have so much passion for #Bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be.

We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it @bluesky:

This will take time to build. We are in the process of interviewing and hiring folks, looking at both starting a standard from scratch or contributing to something that already exists. No matter the ultimate direction, we will do this work completely through public transparency.

It’s important that we acknowledge this is a time of great uncertainty and struggle for so many around the world. Our goal in this moment is to disarm as much as we can, and ensure we are all building towards a greater common understanding, and a more peaceful existence on earth.

I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this. I also recognize it does not feel that way today. Everything we learn in this moment will better our effort, and push us to be what we are: one humanity working together.

Now, as for Jack’s channeling the mind of a high school girl in his wish to promote peace and understanding, we are happy to quote one David Marcus, who went through Twitter and found that it contains many exhortations to violence. Twitter knows about these and simply doesn’t care. It wants merely to destroy Donald Trump and to silence all conservative voices.

Marcus notes:

Twitter hosts a #KillTrump hashtag. In all of the glorious English language there is no clearer, plainer, or shorter way to call for violence than the word kill followed by someone’s name. But there it is. One of these tweets reads “#ArrestTrump not enough #KillTrump.” And this isn’t new, back in June the hashtag #AssassinateTrump was bouncing around the website with gems like “Someone take this clown out NOW.” That tweet is still up.

And while Trump’s alleged calls for violence, in fact he explicitly called for peaceful protest, got him banned, the Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted this in November, “. . . Palestine will be free, while the fake Zionist regime will perish. There’s no doubt about this.” So encouraging a completely legal challenge to election results gets our President banned, but the leader of Iran’s brutal state threatening to wipe out Israel is no problem at all.

There is a Twitter account that calls itself “Pigs In A Blanket, Fry Em Like Bacon,” a call to kill police that is also found in myriad tweets. There is currently a tweet up from the day of the Capitol riots that reads “I hope the Trumpers out there all die of Covid. When Congressman elect Luke Letlow did die with Covid there were tweets celebrating or calling it justice.

Now let us praise sanctimonious hypocrites.