Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on Tuesday delved into the need for a free and open social media protocol and also announced measures for advancing such a platform.
What Happened: Following multiple “Twitter Files” disclosures, Dorsey outlined the basic principles that he thinks should govern a social media platform – resilience to corporate controls, the privilege of removing content vested only with the original author and the implementation of moderation by algorithmic choice.
The tech entrepreneur noted that the Twitter he led and the Twitter of today do not meet any of the principles. Blaming himself for the predicament, he said he gave up pushing for these principles when an activist investor took a stake in the stock.
“The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves,” Dorsey said.
“Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control,” he added.
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The Way Out: The only way to preserve the three principles is a “free and open protocol” for social media. And it shouldn't be owned by a single company or a group of companies and be resilient to corporate and government influence, Dorsey added.
He said he wished Twitter and every company would be transparent in action. Regarding the Twitter Files, he said he would have preferred them to be released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.
Dorsey expressed his displeasure at former employees being targeted and said instead the blame should be directed at him and his actions alone.
He named @bluesky with the AT Protocol, Mastodon and Matrix as projects which are based on open social media protocols. Many more will likely emerge and one will have the chance of becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP, he added.
“This isn’t about a 'decentralized Twitter.' This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet,” Dorsey said.
To accelerate open internet and protocol work, he said he plans to open a new category of grants with the objective of giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media, private communication protocols, Bitcoin BTC/USD and a web-only mobile OS.
Dorsey also pledged a grant of $1 million per year to Signal, a cross-platform centralized instant messaging service.
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