Jack Dorsey Agrees Trump Belongs on Twitter: ‘Permanent Bans Are a Failure of Ours and Don’t Work’
Marco Bello/AFP via Getty Images
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Tuesday former President Donald Trump belongs on Twitter, as do other individuals the company has banned.
Elon Musk is in the process of acquiring the company. He said Tuesday if he indeed buys the platform, he will reinstate the former president’s account.
“I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and foolish in the extreme,” Musk said Tuesday. “I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump, I think that was a mistake… It alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”
“I guess the answer is I would reverse the perma-ban,” he added.
Axios editor Dan Primack noted that in his comments, Musk said Dorsey agreed with him about doing away with permanent bans for individuals.
Musk says @jack agrees with him that there shouldn’t be permanent bans on individual Twitter users.
Reminder that Dorsey was CEO when such bans were implemented.
— Dan Primack (@danprimack) May 10, 2022
Dorsey, who was running the platform when Trump was suspended, quickly replied.
In his comment, he shared a Jan.13, 2021 tweet in which he commented on Trump’s suspension following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
I do agree. There are exceptions (CSE, illegal behaviour, spam or network manipulation, etc), but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work, which I wrote about here after the event (and called for a resilient social media protocol): https://t.co/fQ9KnrCQGX
— jack⚡️ (@jack) May 10, 2022
On that date, days after Trump was permanently banned, Dorsey wrote:
I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?
Twitter cited the potential that Trump might incite violence on the date he was axed. The company highlighted two tweets from him after the Capitol was stormed, and stated:
After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined that these Tweets are in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy and the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.
Trump, whose platform TRUTH Social is off to a rough start, has said he has no intention of returning to Twitter.
Dorsey stepped down as CEO of the company he helped found last November.
