This archive report was first published on 7 August 2020.
Published on August 7, 2020, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, reflected on the platform's mistakes and its impact on public discourse.
At the time, Dorsey struggled to envision the app's potential social implications, including how design decisions might affect how people interact with each other.
He believed that Twitter played a correlative, not causal, role in shaping public discourse, amplifying trends that existed 'in parallel' to the platform.
'Abuse and harassment did not start after this polarization or the political dialogue coming on Twitter,' Dorsey said. 'It's been on the internet forever.'
Learning from Mistakes ¶
Dorsey emphasized the need for Twitter to learn from past mistakes and adapt to changing circumstances.
'It would be silly for us not to change Twitter,' he said. 'To become irrelevant if it doesn't change, if it doesn't constantly evolve and if it doesn't recognize gaps and opportunities to get better.'
He hoped to build openness and admission of wrongdoing into the platform's discourse, allowing users to express their past and history in context.
'If we can't express that, we can't learn from it, and then we can't really progress,' Dorsey said. 'Or improve as a culture, or as individuals either.'
