Last night, amid growing pressure to address Alex Jones’ presence on Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey tried to explain the company’s position. In a series of five tweets, he made the following case:
Jones hasn’t violated Twitter’s rules.Twitter won’t ban someone just because other platforms did.Journalists should “document, validate, and refute” the “unsubstantiated rumors” that “accounts like Jones’” spread.
He then linked to a somewhat confounding new blog post, “The Twitter Rules: A Living Document,” that does little more than say that the Twitter rules are a living document. It was confounding in that no one had accused the Twitter rules of being a dead document, only a weak and erratically enforced one, in any case it seemed to bear little relation to Dorsey’s tweets, even though they were published simultaneously.
Publicly, the tweet storm generated more than 20,000 replies in its first 24 hours. It seemed like a lot for Twitter to say on a subject where it had taken no action, especially given that inaction is the company’s default operating mode on policy issues. It generated a flood of negative commentary from journalists, who took exception the idea that they should serve in an unpaid role as Twitter’s unofficial moderators; and from current and former employees, who were put off by Dorsey’s muddy reasoning.
Emily Horne, until recently Twitter’s head of policy communications, called out Dorsey’s apparent undermining of its messaging. “Truth is we’ve been terrible at explaining our decisions in the past. We’re fixing that,” he tweeted. To which Horne responded: “Please don’t blame the current state of play on communications. These decisions aren’t easy, but they aren’t comms calls and it’s unhelpful to denigrate your colleagues whose credibility will help explain them.
Dorsey replied that he wasn’t blaming the team, although he has before. In November, Twitter was dealing with a series of tweets containing graphic anti-Muslim videos. The tweets were posted by Britain First, a far-right fringe group, and were later retweeted by President Donald Trump. Twitter decided to let the tweets stand because, while they may have violated its rules, they were newsworthy.
A day later, the company reversed course, saying the tweets were allowed because — like Jones — they didn’t violate its rules after all. “We mistakenly pointed to the wrong reason we didn’t take action on the videos from earlier this week,” Dorsey tweeted.
In both cases, Dorsey framed Twitter’s struggles to address hate speech on its platform not as issues of policy but of communication. And yet, as one former Twitter employee noted to me yesterday, Dorsey’s tweetstorm itself communicated no real information about Jones or company policy. The fact that he hadn’t been found in violation of its rules was apparent by the fact that his account remained active.
At the same time, the thread introduced at least three new problems. One, by having its CEO discuss individual accounts publicly, Twitter encouraged the idea that account banning is subject to a single person’s whims. Two, it publicly undermined Twitter’s communications team for the second time in a year. Three, it inexplicably passed the buck for enforcing its policies to journalists.
None of that came up Wednesday afternoon, when Dorsey — turning his attention to the conservative fantasy that Republicans are being ”shadow banned“ from the service — went on Sean Hannity’s radio show. As Dorsey calmly explained timeline ranking, Hannity praised Dorsey lavishly for his inaction over Jones. No one learned anything.
For that we had to wait until Wednesday afternoon, when Charlie Warzel posted an internal memo from Twitter safety chief Del Harvey. (Harvey later tweeted it herself.) Harvey was also the author of the “living document” blog post, but the memo, despite being of basically equal length, contained vastly more information.
The reason Jones hasn’t been banned, she said, is that while his past actions violate Twitter’s current rules, they didn’t violate its rules at the time.
Jones hasn’t violated Twitter’s rules.Twitter won’t ban someone just because other platforms did.Journalists should “document, validate, and refute” the “unsubstantiated rumors” that “accounts like Jones’” spread.
He then linked to a somewhat confounding new blog post, “The Twitter Rules: A Living Document,” that does little more than say that the Twitter rules are a living document. It was confounding in that no one had accused the Twitter rules of being a dead document, only a weak and erratically enforced one, in any case it seemed to bear little relation to Dorsey’s tweets, even though they were published simultaneously.
Publicly, the tweet storm generated more than 20,000 replies in its first 24 hours. It seemed like a lot for Twitter to say on a subject where it had taken no action, especially given that inaction is the company’s default operating mode on policy issues. It generated a flood of negative commentary from journalists, who took exception the idea that they should serve in an unpaid role as Twitter’s unofficial moderators; and from current and former employees, who were put off by Dorsey’s muddy reasoning.
Emily Horne, until recently Twitter’s head of policy communications, called out Dorsey’s apparent undermining of its messaging. “Truth is we’ve been terrible at explaining our decisions in the past. We’re fixing that,” he tweeted. To which Horne responded: “Please don’t blame the current state of play on communications. These decisions aren’t easy, but they aren’t comms calls and it’s unhelpful to denigrate your colleagues whose credibility will help explain them.
Dorsey replied that he wasn’t blaming the team, although he has before. In November, Twitter was dealing with a series of tweets containing graphic anti-Muslim videos. The tweets were posted by Britain First, a far-right fringe group, and were later retweeted by President Donald Trump. Twitter decided to let the tweets stand because, while they may have violated its rules, they were newsworthy.
A day later, the company reversed course, saying the tweets were allowed because — like Jones — they didn’t violate its rules after all. “We mistakenly pointed to the wrong reason we didn’t take action on the videos from earlier this week,” Dorsey tweeted.
In both cases, Dorsey framed Twitter’s struggles to address hate speech on its platform not as issues of policy but of communication. And yet, as one former Twitter employee noted to me yesterday, Dorsey’s tweetstorm itself communicated no real information about Jones or company policy. The fact that he hadn’t been found in violation of its rules was apparent by the fact that his account remained active.
At the same time, the thread introduced at least three new problems. One, by having its CEO discuss individual accounts publicly, Twitter encouraged the idea that account banning is subject to a single person’s whims. Two, it publicly undermined Twitter’s communications team for the second time in a year. Three, it inexplicably passed the buck for enforcing its policies to journalists.
None of that came up Wednesday afternoon, when Dorsey — turning his attention to the conservative fantasy that Republicans are being ”shadow banned“ from the service — went on Sean Hannity’s radio show. As Dorsey calmly explained timeline ranking, Hannity praised Dorsey lavishly for his inaction over Jones. No one learned anything.
For that we had to wait until Wednesday afternoon, when Charlie Warzel posted an internal memo from Twitter safety chief Del Harvey. (Harvey later tweeted it herself.) Harvey was also the author of the “living document” blog post, but the memo, despite being of basically equal length, contained vastly more information.
The reason Jones hasn’t been banned, she said, is that while his past actions violate Twitter’s current rules, they didn’t violate its rules at the time.
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