Twitter Is Helping To Build An Alternative To Twitter, Says CEO Jack Dorsey
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said today in a tweetstorm that his company is exploring the development of a decentralized standard for social media. He revealed the initiative, dubbed @bluesky, in a long thread that attempted to explain Twitter’s recent and controversial deplatforming of President Donald Trump and other conservative commenters.
The move by Twitter on @bluesky is one of several in the works by blockchain developers in the wake of the takedowns by social media services and providers like Amazon. The surprise is that Twitter would contribute to a concept that may lead to its own demise.
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“We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media,” Dorsey said in his tweetstorm. “Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it #bluesky.”
He continued, “Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.”
Dorsey likened the proposed new decentralized standard to Bitcoin, the digital currency which is also decentralized. Dorsey called it “a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be.”
He acknowledged that such a project “will take time to build. We are in the process of interviewing and hiring folks, looking at both starting a standard from scratch or contributing to something that already exists. No matter the ultimate direction, we will do this work completely through public transparency.”
The long tweetstorm also attempted to justify Twitter’s deplatforming, which has drawn criticism from everyone from users to foreign government leaders. He acknowledged that it has emboldened other social media services to follow Twitter’s lead. That happened again today, as Snapchat permanently banned Donald Trump.
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?
— jack (@jack) January 14, 2021
I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this. I also recognize it does not feel that way today. Everything we learn in this moment will better our effort, and push us to be what we are: one humanity working together.
— jack (@jack) January 14, 2021
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