(2022-12-13) Dorsey A Native Internet Protocol For Social Media

Jack Dorsey: a native internet protocol for social media. There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take,*

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe...

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company. (Elliott Management)

I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Donald Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society.

Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this

I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all

As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen.

As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, Mastodon another, Matrix.org yet another…and there will be many more.

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