Twitter founder Jack Dorsey says he lost control of Twitter and ‘gave up’ when an activist investor took control of the firm in 2020

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has admitted that the social media company’s many failures were his fault – before immediately blaming one of the tech firm’s activist investors. 

In a blog post published Tuesday, Dorsey owned up to allowing the company to stray from preserving free of speech, but added that he only allowed that to happen when he ‘no longer had hope’ maintaining it after an unnamed investment group bought up stock in the company in 2020.

Dorsey did not specify which company that was, but he was likely pointing to the Elliot Management, which that year bought a majority share in Twitter for $387million under the direction of managing partner Jesse Cohn, who then set about trying to oust Dorsey.

The former Twitter CEO’s comments come as the new chief twit Elon Musk started releasing internal Twitter files from before his take over, which showed that the company actively tried to suppress the tweets of many conservative account-holders.

Jesse Cohn, a managing partner at the $55billion hedge fund Elliot Management which bought a majority share in Twitter in 2020 for $387million

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I have been unable to find Dorsey’s blog. In the linked article, Dorsey makes it clear that he lost control of Twitter to a wealthy investor. According to this article, Dorsey wanted to established 3 rules for Twitter, which he believes should apply to all social media companies:

He said that the first rule for social media companies ought to be ‘resilience to corporate and government control,’ as well as only allowing the ‘original author to remove content they produce,’ and finally relying on ‘algorithmic choice’ to implement moderation online. 

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I like Dorsey’s first rule, but believe: The correct algorithm to use on Twitter is Twitter users being allowed to say and view what they want. This algorithm will work perfectly while also conforming perfectly to our First Amendment. ABN

UPDATE: Dorsey’s blog post is here. My reading of his post is it agrees with what I am saying in: The correct algorithm to use on Twitter is Twitter users being allowed to say and view what they want. He has more knowledge about how to do this but the underlying principles are the same: users of the internet and social media have complete control over what they view and what they say. Filters and algorithms are controlled by individual users, not governments or corporations or hedge funds. ABN