Jack Dorsey

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Dorsey in 2014
Against allopathy
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“”In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon [Musk] is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.
—some New Age mumbo jumbo ("light of consciousness") that Dorsey probably regrets following Musk's takeover of Twitter[1]
Dorsey, not seeing any Nazis

Jack Patrick Dorsey (1976–) was the CEO of Twitter until the end of 2021,[2] founded the BlueskyWikipedia Twitter clone afterwards[3] and is the CEO of SquareWikipedia mobile payments system. This has made him so hyper-busy that he has had to search out new crank methods for de-stressing. He is effectively a libertarian, though he is not known to have declared himself as such.[4][5]

Nazis, what Nazis?[edit]

“”We're committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.
—Jack Dorsey[6]

Nazis are a known problem, but Dorsey has blamed the victims (non-Nazi Twitter users) for not reporting Nazis:[7][8]

“”A lot of the calls for “remove the Nazis” are also due to the fact our enforcement operates on reporting. A lot of people don’t report. They see things, but it’s easier to tweet out “get rid of the Nazis” than to report it.

Despite the topic of Twitter Nazis being one that he should have been prepared for, that he did, in fact, think he was prepared for, he actually was factually wrong in the most painfully obvious way about Twitter Nazis — that they exist:[8]

Dorsey: "It actually is. If they align themselves with a violent extremist group, like the American Nazi Party, we suspend their account. There are not self-professed Nazis. If you can show them, I would love to see them, and figure out why we haven't taken action on them, but…"
Brian Hiatt: I can confirm that there are Nazis on Twitter.


Evidentially, it would seem that Dorsey still does not give a fuck.[9][10]

Dorsey is also highly deferential to populist (i.e., popular on Twitter) authoritarian figures such as Donald Trump:[11]

Ashley Feinberg: OK, but if Trump tweeted out asking each of his followers to murder one journalist, would you remove him?
Dorsey: That would be a violent threat. We’d definitely ... You know we’re in constant communication with all governments around the world. So we’d certainly talk about it.
Feinberg: OK, but if he did that, would that be grounds to—
Dorsey: I'm not going to talk about particulars. We’ve established protocol, it’s transparent. It’s out there for everyone to read.[note 1] We have, independent of the U.S. president, we have conversations with all governments. It’s not just limited to this one.

Nostr logo

Dorsey now has a long history of leaving organizations after he tires of them for kicking out Nazis:

  • In 1999, he was a briefly doorman at the anti-Nazi punk rock club 924 Gilman Street,Wikipedia[13][14]
  • In 2022, he sold Twitter to Musk thinking Musk that with Musk's privatization of Twitter, it could avoid content moderation,[15] though this turned out to be a false assumption due to continuing legal threats.
  • In 2024, he left blockchain-based Bluesky after their board of directors decided that they needed some amount of content moderation after all.[15]
  • In 2023 threw some money at another blockchain-based social media product called NostrWikipedia which seems to only be attractive to Bitcoin advocates due to its high bar for entrance (involving a cryptographic key pair).[15] Ironically, the Nostr logo features an ostrich, which symbolically represents an inability to recognize a problem.[16]

Woo promotion[edit]

Dorsey, with nose ring

Dorsey practices meditation for 10 days a year. He starts each day with "salt juice", which is water with Himalayan salt and lemon added; Twitter makes this available at its offices around the world. Before going to work each day, he alternates several times between using a home electromagnetic field-blocking infrared sauna and an ice bath (the latter is normally a legitimate treatment for people with high fevers). He fasts from Friday evening until Sunday evening and only eats one low carbohydrate meal[17] on other days.[18][19] Dorsey began his fasting regimen in 2017 after viewing the film Fasting.[20] Dorsey also takes a multivitamin as well as "a lot of vitamin C",[19][note 2] which probably does nothing but could give him the runs[22] be compensatory for his dietary deficiencies. In 2019, Dorsey apparently began promoting another fad diet, the alkaline diet, by tweeting an image of "alkaline spring water" with no comment.[23]

Because of his unusual dietary habits, Dorsey has been accused of promoting eating disorders, for this is what it is even if the tech bros call it "biohacking".[24][25] According to a UK dietitian, Dorsey's diet is dangerous since he likely runs a constant calorie deficit.[17]

Even though he is so busy running two multi-billion dollar companies, he still finds time to promote his brand of crankery. His nose ring[26] shows that he is a leader and that you too can be led around like a water buffalo if you buy his promoted products.

Charity[edit]

Dorsey's record on charitable giving is not well-focused (except on public relations), with a history of unkept promises, and an ever-present capacity for Dorsey to just take back the money into his personal hoard.[27]

To Dorsey's credit, it did create a public spreadsheet of exact amounts of donations and charity names, disbursing $0.5 billion of a promised $1.1 billion from April 2020 through December 2022.[28] Dorsey's sinking $1 billion into Musk's Twitter purchase debacle during the same time period (2022) perhaps shows where his real allegiances lie.[29]

Bitcoin promotion[edit]

See the main article on this topic: Bitcoin
“”Crypto spam on Twitter really needs to be crushed. It's a major blight on the user experience and they scam so many innocent people.
—Elon Musk in March 2022, who wasn't serious about this or much else.[30]:8

In February 2020, Dorsey began to quietly promote Bitcoin by including a Bitcoin hashtag on his Twitter profile.[31] Dorsey's tweets about Bitcoin had been nonexistent or sporadic until about February 8, 2021,[32] corresponding roughly with Elon Musk's public and rather nutty purchase (via Tesla) of US$1.5 billion in Bitcoin.[33][34] The purchase resulted in an all-time high Bitcoin purchase price at the same time that Dorsey was retweeting a 'Black Bitcoin' promoter (@bitcoinzay) urging African Americans to become "Satoshi millionaires" (1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 Bitcoin = roughly 0.0005 USD in February 2021) by purchasing Bitcoin (roughly US$500 worth) when the price was high,[32] amounting to what is effectively affinity fraud or even pump and dump. Following Musk's purchase of Twitter in November 2022, Dorsey's Twitter feed went to nearly-total cryptocurrency.[35]

Association with the far-right extremists[edit]

Dorsey with Ali Alexander

Far-right conspiracy theorist Tim Pool has claimed that he corresponded with Dorsey in private and that Dorsey "seems very adamant that far-right figures be given unrestrained platforms."[36] This is confirmed by Twitter's history of giving a platform to racists, anti-semites, misogynists, harassers, and advocates of violence. Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy told the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC):

“”Pseudonymous accounts and ban evasion have long been tried and true tactics employed by dedicated anti-Black, antisemitic and misogynistic harassment networks on Twitter. These factions easily manipulated Twitter’s functionality to remain online and gamified the spread of racism and far-right ideology on the platform.
—Brian Friedberg[36]

James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, which was the subject of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, told SPLC that he and his staff have been the subject of over 5 years of harassment (including a gun incident at the restaurant), in large part due to the amplification of the conspiracy theory that Twitter provided.[37] He told SPLC that there was nothing that could be done about Twitter.[37] Jack Posobiec, one of the principal promoters of Pizzagate, was a nobody until Twitter promoted him.[37] The claim that nothing could be done about Twitter users' behavior was confirmed by an inside source familiar with Twitter's moderation who said that the low-level Twitter moderators are powerless and that they are bound by the libertarian-ideology-driven decisions of Twitter's leadership.[36]

Dorsey has at various times followed a number of people on the extreme far right on Twitter, including white nationalist Stefan Molyneux.[36] This, of course, does not make Dorsey an extremist, but it does remove the excuse that he was ignorant of their specific views.

Dorsey told The Huffington Post that he sought business advice from convicted felon and far-right agitator Ali Alexander.[38] Of Ali, Dorsey said, "I was introduced to him by a friend, and you know, he’s got interesting points."[38] Ali's account was briefly suspended from Twitter in 2019 after he threatened an AOC supporter's life.[38] Ali claimed that he advised Dorsey not to ban Alex Jones from Twitter, which may have resulted in a delay in removing Jones from using Twitter as a platform for harassment and conspiracy promotion.[38][39] Regarding the initial non-banning of Jones, Dorsey claimed, "…And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified",[39] but there is evidence that the far right has been artificially amplified on Twitter at least in part by gaming the Twitter algorithm.[36] Alexander was one of the principle organizers of "Stop the Steal", which led up the 2021 coup attempt on the Capitol. He claimed that his link to Stop the Steal was initially banned on Twitter in December 2020 but that his special relationship with Twitter enabled him to have the ban removed.[36][40] Alexander continued to threaten violence around his campaigning for Stop the Steal events, but he was not banned from Twitter until 3 days after the violence actually occurred on January 6, 2021.[41]

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ↑ The protocol however differs externally[12] vs. internally with regard to whether number of followers affects the decision to suspend someone.
  2. ↑ Dorsey didn't say how much "a lot" is, but 2000 mg is the maximum recommended dose per day, which if exceeded can cause gastrointestinal disturbances, increased oxalate excretion and kidney stone formation, increased uric acid excretion, excess iron absorption, lowered vitamin B12 levels, systemic conditioning, pro-oxidant effects.[21]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness. by Jack Dorsey (2:03 AM · Apr 26, 2022) Twitter (archived from 27 Apr 2022 14:15:31 UTC).
  2. ↑ Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down by Elizabeth Dwoskin & Rachel Lerman (November 29, 2021) The Washington Post
  3. ↑ Twitter’s decentralized future by Lucas Matney (January 15, 2021) TechCrunch
  4. ↑ Jack Dorsey’s TED Interview and the End of an Era by Anna Wiener (April 27, 2019) The New Yorker.
  5. ↑ Jack Dorsey, a Plausible Libertarian (January 10, 2021) After Economics.
  6. ↑ We're committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress. by Jack Dorsey (1 Mar 2018) Twitter (archived from January 25, 2020).
  7. ↑ Jack Dorsey: Twitter Nazis Are Here to Stay. Wall Street, among others, wishes the C.E.O. would stop talking. by Bess Levin (January 23, 2019) Vanity Fair.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: The Rolling Stone Interview: Sometimes 280 characters just aren’t enough. The social media mogul takes on his critics — and tries to explain who he really is by Brian Hiatt (January 23, 2019 6:00AM ET) Rolling Stone.
  9. ↑ Seth Rogen says Twitter CEO 'does not seem to give a f***' about fighting white supremacists. Dude claims he had a direct line to @jack — for 8 whole months. by Sean Hollister (July 3, 2018 12:04 PM PDT) CNET.
  10. ↑ I've been DMing with @jack about his bizarre need to verify white supremacists on his platform for the last 8 months or so, and after all the exchanges, I've reached a conclusion: the dude simply does not seem to give a fuck. by Seth Rogen (8:28 AM · Jul 3, 2018) Twitter (archived from 2 Feb 2020 18:16:43 UTC).
  11. ↑ Jack Dorsey Has No Clue What He Wants: A Q&A with Twitter’s CEO on right-wing extremism, Candace Owens, and what he’d do if the president called on his followers to murder journalists. by Ashley Feinberg (01/17/2019 03:29 pm ET Updated Jan 28, 2019) Huffington Post.
  12. ↑ Hateful conduct policy Twitter (archived from January 27, 2020).
  13. ↑ Jack Dorsey talks about childhood, punk culture, and Mark Zuckerberg in wild interview by Annie Vainshtein (June 21, 2019 2:31 p.m.) SFGate.
  14. ↑ Take Off Your Swastika: Berkeley Punks Rule&nbs;— Gilman Street/Green Day Film Arrives Just In Time For Campus "Free Speech Year" by Denise Sullivan (September 19, 2017) Down With Tyranny!
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, decentralised social networks and the very common crowd by David Gerard (10th May 2024).
  16. ↑ Ostrich head in sand by Karl S. Kruszelnicki (02 November 2006) ABC Australia.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Top UK dietitian weighs in on Jack Dorsey’s bizarre diet (it’s risky!) by Matthew Hughes (April 15, 2019) The Next Web.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Jack Dorsey Is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley by Nellie Bowles (May 2, 2019) The New York Times.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Billionaire Jack Dorsey’s 11 'wellness' habits: From no food all weekend to ice baths by Catherine Clifford (Published Mon, Apr 8 2019 • 10:10 AM EDT Updated Tue, Apr 9 2019 • 4:24 PM EDT) CNBC.
  20. ↑ Watched this documentary on fasting. Good. For the past year and a half I've been eating only one meal a day: dinner. Not for everyone, but it works for me. Non-intuitive, but I find I have a lot more energy and focus, feel healthier and happier, and my sleep is much deeper. by Jack Dorsey (17 Jul 2018) Twitter (archived from May 3, 2019).
  21. ↑ Nutrient Recommendations: Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI) National Institutes of Health Office of Dietary Supplements (2011).
  22. ↑ Is it possible to take too much vitamin C? by Katherine Zeratsky (March 18, 2020) Mayo Clinic.
  23. ↑ image of Flow® alkaline spring water by Jack Dorsey (14:58 - 6. 8. 2019) Twitter (archived from August 8, 2019).
  24. ↑ Jack Dorsey’s 5-meals-a-week diet looks a lot like a Silicon Valley-style eating disorder. From keto to fasting to 5:2 to hundreds of supplements, the tech world’s food “bio-hacking” is just another word for disordered eating.by Sarah Manavs (10 April 2019) New Statesman.
  25. ↑ The dangerous dark side of intermittent fasting for weight loss by Jane Ridley (January 7, 2021) New York Post.
  26. ↑ Jack Dorsey Got a Nose Ring by Sam Schube (June 8, 2018) GQ.
  27. ↑ Jack Dorsey comes out as a philanthropist: The Twitter and Square CEO’s Start Small has a new form, and a new dollar figure: $1 billion. But it is actually just a modest increase from his previous philanthropic commitments, which he has done little to fulfill. by Owen Thomas (April 8, 2020; Updated: April 10, 2020 10:50 p.m.) The San Francisco Chronicle.
  28. ↑ #startsmall tracker Google Docs.
  29. ↑ Here’s who helped Elon Musk buy Twitter: Who pulls the financial strings at Twitter? These are Musk’s backers by Hamza Shaban & Faiz Siddiqui (December 24, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST) The Washington Post.
  30. ↑ Elon Musk text exhibits (Twitter v. Musk) by Elon Musk (2022-02-31 15;23:49 CDT) Document Cloud.
  31. ↑ @jack Twitter (archived from February 3, 2020).
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 @jack Twitter (archived from February 8, 2021).
  33. ↑ Tesla buys $1.5 billion in bitcoin, plans to accept it as payment Steve Kovach (Published Mon, Feb 8 20217:48 AM EST; Updated Mon, Feb 8 20211:43 PM EST) CNBC.
  34. ↑ Elon Musk Loses $15 Billion in a Day After Bitcoin Warning by Devon Pendleton (February 22, 2021, 2:03 PM PST Updated on February 23, 2021, 5:11 AM PST) Bloomberg.
  35. ↑ Jack Twitter (archived from December 17, 2022).
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 36.2 36.3 36.4 36.5 'We Make Mistakes': Twitter's Embrace of the Extreme Far Right (July 07, 2021) Southern Poverty Law Center.
  37. ↑ 37.0 37.1 37.2 'There's nothing you can do': The Legacy of #PizzaGate by Michael Edison Hayden (July 07, 2021) Southern Poverty Law Center.
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 38.2 38.3 Jack Dorsey Thinks Fringe Figure Ali Akbar Makes ‘Interesting Points’: The Twitter CEO consulted with the right-wing political commentator over whether he should permanently remove Alex Jones from the platform. by Jesselyn Cook (01/18/2019 05:45 am ET) Huffington Post.
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified. by Jack Dorsey (5:11 PM - 7 Aug 2018) Twitter (archived from March 14, 2021).
  40. ↑ ‘There’s An Accountability Tidal Wave Coming’—Ali Alexander, National Organizer of ‘Stop the Steal’ by Jan Jekielek (December 11, 2020) Epoch Times (archived from February 15, 2021).
  41. ↑ ‘Stop the Steal’ Organizer in Hiding After Denying Blame for Riot: On Sunday night, Twitter banned Ali Alexander’s personal account and an account for “Stop the Steal.” by Will Sommer (Updated Jan. 10, 2021 9:40PM ET / Published Jan. 10, 2021 9:08PM ET) The Daily Beast.
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