Twitter Demands "Healthy" Behavior by Users
The Hill Interview: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explains what
got Alex Jones suspended
By HARPER NEIDIG - 08/15/18 09:25 PM EDT
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey isn’t sure if the timeout given
to Alex Jones will convince the right-wing conspiracy theorist to “reconsider”
his social media behavior.
But Dorsey, in an interview with The Hill the morning
after his company handed down a seven-day suspension to Jones, says its
enforcement actions are intended to promote better behavior from its users.
“We're always trying to cultivate more of a learning
mindset and help guide people back towards healthier behaviors and healthier
public conversation,” the 41-year-old co-founder of Twitter said.
“We also think it's important to clarify what our
principles are, which we haven't done a great job of in the past, and we need
to take a step back and make sure that we are clearly articulating what those
mean and what our objectives are.”
Dorsey, wearing a black T-shirt that showed off a forearm
tattoo unusual for a Washington, D.C., setting, spoke to The Hill during a
furious media tour that included interviews with NBC’s Lester Holt and The
Washington Post.
He’s doing outreach amid stark criticism that Twitter has
been too soft on Jones, the Infowars owner who has suggested the Sandy Hook
Elementary School shooting was staged — and that Twitter’s content and behavior
rules are unclear.
Apple, Facebook and Spotify are among the tech companies
that have banned Jones and Infowars in the last 10 days, but Twitter argued
Jones had not actually violated its content policies until a Tuesday tweet
linking to a Periscope video in which he urged his followers to take up “battle
rifles” in the crusade against censorship.
Dorsey said he wasn’t involved in the decision to
restrict the accounts and that he found out about it after the fact through a
text from Twitter lead counsel Vijaya Gadde, who also attended the interview.
“We were getting a number of reports around the tweet and
the Periscope that the content was inciting violence, which is against our
terms of service, and we took action,” Dorsey said.
For seven days, Jones’s account will essentially be
restricted to reading tweets and sending direct messages to his followers.
“The timeout, for instance, is something that we've built
because research has shown that if you give people a break or pause they
reconsider their behaviors and actions,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey said Twitter constantly has to look at what it is
doing to improve its platform — which has a reputation for hosting unbridled
speech.
Twitter permanently banned the conservative provocateur
Milo Yiannopoulos in 2016, after he repeatedly insulted the comedian and
actress Leslie Jones, for violating rules against targeted abuse and
harassment. But the service has continued to come under criticism for the
nastiness and vitriol of many of its users.
“The point here is this is not concrete,” Dorsey said of
the actions taken against Alex Jones. “These have to constantly evolve and our
methods have to constantly evolve as well.”
Dorsey had come under criticism himself for a series of
tweets in which he explained Jones had not been initially suspended because he
had not broken the company’s content policies.
CNN then presented Twitter with examples of tweets from
Jones that appeared to violate their rules, and the company conceded that two
of them were recent enough for the social network to have taken action.
Twitter told Jones to delete at least one of the
offending posts, all of which later disappeared from the accounts.
Dorsey told The Hill that Twitter decided not to take
action over the earlier tweets because they hadn’t been flagged at the time.
“Today, a lot of our enforcement actions are based on
reports of violations,” Dorsey said. “We didn't get those reports of violations
[on the past tweets]. The other thing is we don't apply our policies
retroactively.”
If Jones again starts spreading unfounded rumors that the
Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, Dorsey added, Twitter would certainly take
action.
“Our model right now relies heavily on people reporting
violations and reporting things they find suspicious, and then we can act on
it,” he said. “But ultimately we want to take that reporting burden off the
individual and automate a lot more of this.”
Some of those efforts backfired last month after some
high-profile Republicans accused Twitter of “shadow banning” their accounts by
restricting users’ ability to find them through the search function. Twitter
denies that it was targeting conservatives and says that the incident was an
error resulting from their efforts to down-rank certain behaviors on the
platform.
“We identified this as an issue, it was a mistake, we
fixed it within 24 hours," Dorsey said. “We want to be clear that we do
not shadow ban according to political ideology or viewpoint. We do rank the
timeline and we do that with the principle of relevance, but all the content is
still there — you just have to do more work to see it.”
But the incident only intensified the growing criticism
from conservatives that the site was targeting them over their beliefs and
prompted Dorsey’s outreach push. His media tour last week kicked off with a
radio appearance with right-wing commentator Sean Hannity.
Dorsey wouldn’t discuss on the record his talks with
Republican lawmakers or his response to calls for him to testify before the
House Energy and Commerce Committee, but he said that the latest effort is
intended to promote transparency about his company and to get across that
conservatives have a place on his platform.
“We want to be open and available and accessible to all
perspectives and viewpoints,” he said. “We don't want any of our policies or
enforcement or products to make decisions based on viewpoints and ideologies.”
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