BYE, BYE, BIRDIE!
Dorsey a Twitter quitter
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said Monday he will step down as CEO after a series of missteps — including the censoring of a bombshell Post exposé on Hunter Biden — and a share price that has stubbornly trailed those of its peers.
The long-bearded and nose-ringed Dorsey, who had been under pressure from hard-charging billionaire Paul Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, after doing double duty as CEO of Twitter and payment giant Square, said a handpicked successor, Parag Agrawal, would succeed him.
Agrawal, who started at Twitter in 2011 as a software engineer and has served since 2017 as chief technology officer, could more forcefully push the company toward arenas beyond its 280character social posts. He has led Twitter’s artificial-intelligence and machinelearning efforts.
But he’ll also be walking into a hornet’s nest when it comes to the company’s role as an arbiter of content.
Dorsey was blasted after Twitter blocked The Post’s account over its exclusive reports in October 2020 on the contents of a hard drive that held e-mails and other materials from a laptop abandoned at a Delaware repair shop by President Biden’s son Hunter.
The company also drew fire from some who said it was part of the Big Tech censorship brigade that shut former President Donald Trump out of social media when it banned his account after the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol.
Already, Agrawal has been involved in the company’s efforts to fight so-called “misinformation,” which he struggled to define in a November 2020 interview with the MIT Technology Review.
“I think that’s the, the existential question of our times,” he said. “Defining misinformation is really, really hard. As we learn through time, our understanding of truth also evolves.”
He also said, in some of his more controversial remarks, “Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.
“The kinds of things that we do about this is focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the Internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.
“The scarce commodity today is attention. There’s a lot of content out there, a lot of tweets out there. Not all of it gets attention; some subset of it gets attention.”
Agrawal said the company wouldn’t try to “adjudicate truth,” but instead would focus on “potential for harm” when it comes to certain content.
Adjudicating content is one area in which stumbled badly — and he admitted as much when he told congressional lawmakers after the service locked The Post’s accounts that the handling of the reports was a “total mistake.”
Twitter had demanded The Post delete six tweets with links to stories that Twitter claimed — without any evidence — were based on hacked information.
Twitter also obscured the tweets from public view, but The Post held fast as outrage against the platform mounted, leading the social-media company to back down and announce it was revising its “Hacked Materials Policy” and “updating our practice of not retroactively overturning prior enforcement.”
Agrawal will have his work cut out for him on another front, too: Twitter’s share price is down more than 1.5 percent over the past year, compared with gains of 10 percent at Snap over the same time frame and more than 22 percent at Facebook’s Meta.
Critics of Dorsey have long been skeptical of his dual roles as CEO of Twitter and Square, charging that he can’t effectively manage both multibillion-dollar companies.
Investors initially cheered the news of Dorsey’s exit, sending Twitter shares spiking more than 11 percent before they fell to end the day at $45.78, down 2.74 percent.