Oh, so now it was a bad idea to ban Donald Trump on Twitter. That’s what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is now saying, adding that permanent bans are just self-defeating. Obviously, you ban accounts that are posting things that are illegal, like child porn, but Dorsey added that these moves don’t work. He chalked up the move to ban Trump during the waning months of his tenure as a business decision that shouldn’t have been (via NY Post):
Then why didn’t Jack reverse it? https://t.co/h3BvjkT8vj
— Ian McKelvey (@ian_mckelvey) May 11, 2022
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has admitted that he should never have allowed then-President Donald Trump to be banned from his social media giant.
The tech titan conceded Tuesday it was the wrong move after Elon Musk, Twitter’s presumptive new owner, said he would reinstate Trump’s account and that Dorsey agreed that there shouldn’t be permanent bans.
“I do agree,” tweeted Dorsey, who was still at the helm when Trump was banned in January 2020 at the end of his presidency.
He said that there “are exceptions,” listing sexual exploitation of children, illegal behavior or network manipulation.
“But generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work,” he said.
Dorsey also said he agreed with another user who tweeted that “short-sighted’ for “a handful of social media companies” to act as “gatekeepers to political discourse.”
“It was a business decision, it shouldn’t have been,” Dorsey wrote of Trump’s ban, saying that he believes that “permanent bans of individuals are directionally wrong.”
With Twitter about to become a private company again after Elon Musk purchased the social media giant for $44 billion, Trump might be back. Leah wrote yesterday that Musk signaled his intention to reverse the ban on the former president. The decision is now with Trump on whether he wants to stick with his social media platform and let some 80-90 million followers go to waste. That’s a lot of influence that could be cannibalized. I don’t think he will. That’s something that’s too valuable to let atrophy especially if he wants to run again in 2024.
This is all Monday Morning quarterback stuff here from Dorsey. If this was such a bad idea, why did you do it, man? If you feel bans are “directionally wrong,” what gives with the Trump ban or any other bans we’ve seen within the conservative camp. Was this over Twitter’s soft and unhinged woke employees? Was he afraid of a ‘storm the Bastille’ moment at Twitter HQ if he continued to allow Trump to remain on the platform? Who knows? Free Trump. Free all the accounts.
The Elon Musk era of Twitter is going to be great.