Earlier this week, I traveled to San Francisco to participate in a media panel at a large gathering of Twitter's global workforce. While I was in town, I sat down for an exclusive one-on-one interview with Jack Dorsey, the social media platform's founder and CEO. Our discussion ranged from his analysis of the user erosion-driven stock hit his company sustained last week, to the concept of "conversational health," to balancing the encouragement of non-toxicity with free and open exchange, to the recent 'shadow banning' controversy, to the Left-dominated ideological insularity of Big Tech.
On that last issue, Dorsey acknowledged that the current ideological culture among Twitter employees is sufficiently lopsided that dissenters may not feel comfortable raising their voices to share their points of view -- a status quo he calls unacceptable:
I asked @Jack if he understands why many conservatives are concerned about the overwhelmingly liberal tilt of Big Tech/Silicon Valley & whether *intellectual* diversity is an important value for a company like @Twitter. Here's his answer.
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 1, 2018
Link: https://t.co/6JUoSpcgMQ pic.twitter.com/Lb64r34GBC
And here is Jack's commentary about the so-called 'shadow banning' dust-up, the upshot of which is the need for increased transparency with users and the general public:
“The net of this is we need to do a much better job at explaining how our algorithms work. Ideally opening them up so that people can actually see how they work,” Dorsey said in his interview. “We just need to make sure that we’re pushing ourselves to explain exactly how these things work. How we’re making decisions. Where we need to make decisions as humans versus where the algorithms make decisions based on behaviors and signals.”
Listen to the full 13-minute conversation:
AUDIO: My full exclusive interview with @twitter CEO & Founder, @jack on @BensonAndHarf @foxnewsradio -->https://t.co/6JUoSpcgMQ
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 1, 2018
I'll leave you with the president weighing in on accusations of bias against Twitter last week:
Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2018
