Twitter founder Jack Dorsey laments state of app

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has said the company meets none of the standards he hoped to achieve and said social media companies should not be owned by a single person.

Mr Dorsey, who stepped down as CEO of Twitter in November 2021, still retains a 2.4 per cent stake in the company following Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022.

In response to Mr Musk publishing the so-called Twitter Files, Mr Dorsey wrote a blog post detailing perceived issues that have arisen with the social media platform, which he claimed began while he was still in charge.

Mr Dorsey outlined three core principles that he hoped to achieve with Twitter relating to censorship, moderation and outside control, claiming that the company currently meets none of them.

“The only way I know of to truly live up to these three principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influences,” he wrote.

“Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world.”

The tech billionaire went on to claim that the solution was “something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible” through its ability to be decentralised and censorship resistant.

He named a number of competing social media projects that fit this free and open model better than Twitter, including Bluesky, Matrix and Mastodon.

“This isn’t about a ‘decentralised Twitter’,” he wrote. “This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet.

“I believe this is critical both to Twitter’s future, and the public conversation’s ability to truly serve the people, which helps hold governments and corporations accountable.”

Mr Dorsey pledged $1 million per year to private messaging app Signal and said he would continue to give cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on “social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS”.