Photo : Jose Luis Magana ( AP ) Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has some m ore muddled thoughts on moderation on his platform, including a half-assed explanation of why he banned Infowars host Alex Jones and why the president should be allowed to use his platform to threaten nuclear war with North Korea. Advertisement Per the Daily Beast, Dorsey took to comedian-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan’s show in an episode that aired Saturday morning (that’s the same show that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk smoked weed on, for the record). During the show, Rogan asked Dorsey why he had banned Jones, who was kicked off Twitter following a wave of bans on other platforms for his habit of hate speech and attacking mass shooting survivors’ families. “What is social media?” Rogan asked. “Is it something everyone has a right to? Or should it be restricted to only people that are willing to behave and carry themselves in a certain way?” “I believe it’s something that everyone has a right to,” Dorsey replied. “Everyone has a right to?” Rogan continued. “But you still ban people. Like say, Alex Jones, you guys were the last guys to keep Alex Jones on the platform. You were the last ones. I believe it wasn’t until he started harassing you personally.” “No,” Dorsey replied. “[Jones] did very different things on our platform than others. We saw this domino effect over a weekend of one platform banning him, and then another, and then another, and another, in very, very quick succession, and people might have assumed that we would just follow suit, but he didn’t violate our terms of service. Afterwards, he did.” (This is not exactly true. The formal rationale for Twitter’s decision to ban the Infowars host was indeed a live-stream of Jones harassing CNN reporter Oliver Darcy. But before it pulled the plug, a CNN investigation found numerous instances of Jones breaking Twitter rules in other posts, forcing Twitter to concede he had in fact violated their policies.) Advertisement As the Daily Beast noted, Dorsey then bent over backwards to defend the platform’s role hosting Donald Trump, who Rogan suggested had violated policies against encouraging violence with his threats to destroy North Korea . One example: Advertisement Dorsey responded with a confusing stream of thoughts on “context ” and “different mediums,” then suggested that Trump isn’t all different from Obama, who had also threatened to nuke North Korea or something. “It was the context that presidents of this country have used similar language on different mediums,” Dorsey said. “They say it on radio, they say it on television. If you were to look at President Obama, it wasn’t the exact same tone, but there were threats surrounding the same country. We have to take that context into consideration.” Advertisement Dorsey may be referring to the time Obama told CBS News there are “no easy solutions” adding that “We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals. But aside from the humanitarian costs of that, they are right next door to our vital ally, [South] Korea.” These are not equivalent situations, despite the White House’s attempts to pretend they are— Obama clearly intended to explain why he didn’t think going to war with another nuclear-armed power is a good idea. Meanwhile, as far as “context” goes, Trump had previously threatened North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury like the world has never seen. ” Advertisement In any case, this is a good illustration that Dorsey’s version of playing the neutral facilitator often just ends up as either incomprehensible truisms or attempts to placate his most vocal critics ( who in many cases tend to be right-wingers trying to work the refs). Advertisement In any case, Dorsey did have a second explanation for why Trump’s tweets need to stay up that stands up to a little more scrutiny —that his tweets are inherently newsworthy. This is indeed true, even if it is also a way for Twitter to avoid the firestorm that would be sparked if they banned or penalized Trump. “Public figures might be in violation of our terms of service, but the tweet itself is of public interest,” Dorsey told Rogan. “But the tweet itself is of public interest. It should be talked about. That is probably the thing people disagree with the most, and where we have a lot of internal debate.” Advertisement Dorsey also moved slightly from his prior statement that the most Twitter would commit to doing if Trump told his followers to, say, start murdering random journalists, is “certainly talk about it.” “ If we had a public leader, like the president of the United States, make a violent threat against a private individual, we would take action,” Dorsey told Rogan. Advertisement [The Daily Beast]<doc-sep>During his wide-ranging interview with Joe Rogan this week, Jack Dorsey addressed the possibility of adding support for editing tweets. While Dorsey has commented on the oft-requested feature in the past, his comments on Rogan show Twitter is still in the midst of figuring it out. On the show, Rogan suggests that Twitter add support for an edit system where a user could edit their tweet, but the original version of that tweet would still be viewable. Dorsey’s response was that Twitter is looking into “exactly that.” Based on the conversation, however, it seems additional details are still unclear. For instance, Dorsey suggests a 5-second to 30-second window for allowing tweet editing but doesn’t dive too far into specifics. Here’s the full rundown of the conversation: Rogan: The ability to edit, like if you make a typo or something like that. But also the ability for people to see the original. Dorsey: We’re looking at exactly that. The reason we don’t have edit in the first place is we were built on SMS, we were built on text messaging. Once you send a text, you can’t take it back. So when you send a tweet it goes to the world instantaneously. You can’t take it back. You could build it as such so maybe we introduce a 5-second to 30-second delay in the sending. And within that window, you can edit. The issue with going longer than that is it takes that real-time nature of the conversational flow out of it. Rogan: Isn’t clarity more important? You’re still going to have the ability to communicate quickly. Dorsey: It depends on the context. If you’re in the context of an NBA game, you want to be fast and in the moment. You want to be raw. But if you’re in the context of considering what the president just did or making a particular statement, then you probably need some more time. And we can be dynamic there. If you’re hopeful that Twitter will one day allow tweets to be edited, this is certainly good news, albeit slightly vague. What do you think? Should Twitter support editing tweets? Let us know down in the comments. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More. Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:<doc-sep>Co-founder and CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey declared again that he believes Bitcoin (BTC) will be the internet’s native currency. Dorsey made his comments during an interview with American comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan published on Feb. 2. During the interview, Dorsey stated: “[Bitcoin] was something that was born on the internet, that was developed on the internet, that was tested on the internet…It is of the internet.” The Twitter CEO had made a similar claim before, noting in mid-May 2018 that he sees Bitcoin as a choice for the internet’s native currency. Dorsey is also the founder and CEO of mobile payments company Square, which permits its users to trade in Bitcoin. When asked by Rogan if there are any plans to add other cryptos to the app, Dorsey answered that there are not. As Cointelegraph reported in December last year, Square has been named Yahoo Finance’s company of the year. One month earlier, Square had revealed it generated $43 million in Bitcoin revenue for Q3 2018. During the interview, Rogan also asked Dorsey if he sees any pushback in regards to Bitcoin, to which he answered by suggesting to “just look at some of the major banks and their considerations on Bitcoin.” Dorsey noted that “they all love blockchain, because of the efficiencies it can create for their business and potentially new business lines,” but then suggested that this technology is “certainly threatening to certain services behind banks and financial institutions, it’s threatening to some governments as well…” Dorsey also forecasted that the internet is transitioning to a system in which any data that is created will be online permanently. According to him, “this is what blockchain helps enable, down the line, and we need to make sure that we’re paying attention to that.” He further described how he sees the future of the internet: “We’re moving to a world in which anything created exists forever, that there’s no centralized control over who sees what, that these models become completely decentralized and all these barriers that we, that exist today, aren’t as important anymore.” The video of the interview has around 38 thousand dislikes and 5.7 thousand likes. Suggesting that Rogan deleted negative comments from YouTube, multiple users pasted one comment, suggesting that it is a copy of an originally deleted comment: “Sargon of Akkad 2k upvoted, DELETED comment "If we have a right to use social media, you have no justification for banning people, Jack." referring to Jack at 51:21 Copy and paste this.﻿” The comment on Twitter bans could have been a reference to the highly publicized Twitter ban late last year of Alex Jones, the host of far-right website Infowars. In the fall of 2018, while speaking at a hearing about Twitter transparency at the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Dorsey had publicly noted that blockchain could be used to combat misinformation and scams.<doc-sep>
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claimed during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience that he didn’t know what exactly led to Infowars’ Alex Jones permanent blacklisting from the platform. “You were the last guys to keep Alex Jones on the platform. You were the last ones. And I believe you hung in there until he started harassing you personally, right?” asked Rogan. “No, no, no… He did very different things on our platform versus the others. So we saw this domino effect over a weekend of one platform banning him, and then another, and another, in very quick succession, and you know, people would’ve assumed we just would have followed suit, but he didn’t violate our terms of service,” replied Dorsey. “And afterwards, he did. And we have a policy, and if, you know, there’s a violation, we take enforcement actions. One might be asking the account-holder to delete the tweet, another might be a temporary suspension, another might be a permanent suspension.” Rogan then questioned, “So him saying Sandy Hook was fake. He didn’t say that on the platform. He did not say that on Twitter. He only said it on his show… So what did he do on your platform, that you were all in agreement that this is enough?” “I’m not sure what the actual violations were, but we have a set number of actions, and if an account keeps violating a terms of service, ultimately it leads to permanent suspension, and when all the other platforms were taking him off, we didn’t find those,” Dorsey claimed. “We didn’t find those violations and they weren’t reported… People weren’t reporting a lot of the tweets that may have been a violation on our service, and we didn’t act on them.” Jones and his company Infowars were permanently suspended from Twitter in August following a pressure campaign from CNN, BuzzFeed, and left-wing activists. CNN reporter Oliver Darcy personally lobbied for Jones’ suspension after Jones used the Twitter-owned video streaming service Periscope to film himself mocking Darcy outside Dorsey’s hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Following Jones’ permanent suspension, a Twitter spokesperson admitted to the Daily Beast that Jones’ exchange with Darcy, where he referred to the CNN reporter as a “rat,” “possum,” “evil-looking,” and a “virus,” had violated the platform’s rules. Rogan’s episode with Dorsey was heavily criticized by fans as a softball interview, and both the full episode and the clip of Dorsey discussing Alex Jones received more dislikes than likes. “He was banned for telling off CNN’s Oliver Darcy (who had been lobbying social media companies to ban him) at the Jack Dorsey congressional hearing and so then Twitter banned him for ‘harassing’ a ‘journalist’ (who was working in the capacity of a journalist at the time, on public property, while he was covering an event about social media) thus confirming everything Alex Jones was saying about social media censorship,” commented conservative YouTuber Mark Dice. “This interview was soft AF. Shameful,” expressed one user in a comment, while another added, “Joe should’ve just went under the table n blew this dude for 3 hours.” In response to the complaints, Rogan announced that Dorsey had offered to come on his show again. “Good news for everyone that was annoyed that we didn’t cover censorship and deplatforming enough on the podcast with Jack Dorsey because he’s offered to come back on again,” proclaimed Rogan. “I’m going to take the criticism to heart and research all the high profile cases on the right and on the left and any instances that might be viewed as double standards. Anything in particular you think is important please leave a mention in the comments and I’ll have someone make a list.” “One thing I really liked that Jack said was that he felt that the ability to communicate online was a right that we all should have,” he continued. “Maybe there can be a road to redemption for people that have been banned? I’ll keep you folks posted as to when we work out the details and the date.”