After inciting the “Capitol Hill riots”, US President Trump was almost completely blocked by social media, and the ruling characteristics of his “Twitter governance” may become history.
Behind this smoke-free battle, the social media giant led by Twitter has been widely controversial for deviated from the benchmark of “free speech”. Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, is in the eyes of the storm.
Some media criticized him for changing from a “cryptopunk” to today’s “chief speech censor”. However, some media said that there was another hidden secret behind Twitter’s amazing move.
“Non-mainstream” cryptopunk
Dorsey, 44, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He has a talent for “knocking the code” since childhood. The dispatcher he wrote as an underage is still used by some taxi companies. Like some technology tycoons, Dorsey did not finish college.
He dropped out of New York University in 1999, but he framed the prototype of Twitter when he was in college. The National Review described Dorsey as a typical “non-mainstream” in his school days, addicted to “dereavement culture”, often wrote some oppressive style poems, called himself a “grassroots hacker” in his resume, and the overall temperament matched the early counterculture characteristics of the Internet.
To this day, Dorsey is still full of personality: he has a nose ring, grows a beard, eats only one meal a day, and his annual salary in 2019 is only $1. He loves traveling more than working.
At one time, he faced the threat of being expelled from the company by investors because of “unscrupt doing his job”, and he also “unfollowed” Trump, Biden and Zha willfully. Kerberg. He is also a “yoga master” and claims to have two hours of meditation training every day. Moreover, this Silicon Valley giant is also a certified masseuse.
According to some media, Dorsey has been following the route of “cryptopunk” in the early days – this unique group of Internet people attaches great importance to personal privacy and information sharing.
They try to create their own communication and payment systems through the strong encryption technology of the Internet, completely divorced from the control of government agencies. , to realize “freedom” in the true sense.
As an open information dissemination platform, Twitter carried this vision in its early operations. In 2015, Dorsey also declared that “Twitter stands for freedom of speech”.
After Trump “governs Twitter”, Twitter has always suffered from “plint”
Until Trump took office, the disadvantages exposed by “absolute freedom of speech” have become increasingly prominent. Vanity Fair magazine said that Trump boasted that Twitter had achieved him early in the election.
After taking office, he repeatedly made highly inflammatory and harmful remarks, such as threatening to “nuclearize” North Korea and calling protesters who “black lives are also lives” as “thugs”.
In the four years of Trump’s administration, hate crimes in the United States have reached a new high, and the debate within Twitter about whether to “ban Trump” has continued throughout the year round.
Many people feel deeply affected by the three views, and many even want to leave the company for this reason.
As the head of the company, Dorsey has been asked many times whether to “block Trump”, but he has always been ambiguous in the face of the media.
The HuffPost reported that a reporter asked Dorsey a tricky question in 2019: “If Trump incites to murder journalists, will the platform block him?” Dorsey responded vaguely: “This is too violent…
We will discuss it.” Some public opinion has criticized him as a double-sided “opportunist”, but some analysts believe that he has already understood the inescapable “plint” of social media platforms: if the platform takes action on controversial remarks, the majority of users will be dissatisfied; otherwise, the authorities will intervene and severely censor the companies involved. Norm, as the CEO of the company, he may also be invited to Congress for cross-examination.
Under pressure, he finally became a “speech examiner”
After Trump incited the “Capitol Hill riots”, Twitter finally punched him hard. However, according to people familiar with the matter, Dorsey himself is not the leader of this “feat”, but under internal pressure.
It turned out that the series of amazing remarks made on Twitter after Trump’s defeat made Twitter employees unbearable. About 350 people wrote a joint letter urging Dorsey to take action. Dorsey was actually on vacation in French Polynesia when Twitter blocked Trump.
Vanity Fair said that if Dorsey couldn’t help but lose Trump, angry Twitter employees may be “insurgent”. Not only that, Sumofus, a non-governmental organization that oversees large businesses, “pulled banners” in a boat to nearby Dorsey’s waterfront mansion after the Capitol Hill riots, urging him to “ban Trump.”
After banning the words “leader of the free world”, Dorsey carried the nickname of “chief speech censor”. However, the “cryptonpunk” of that year did not give up his dream of building a “decentralization” free network world.
Recently, Dorsey has even used his Twitter account to “bring traffic” for the encrypted information application Signal, which is obviously designed to avoid official censorship.
Moreover, he also actively mediated with the U.S. Treasury Department to lobby the latter to relax restrictions on the application of virtual currencies.
