In a candid interview, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey offered a sobering assessment of the future of free speech on social media platforms. Dorsey argued that given the current centralized architecture, even companies like Twitter that strive to uphold free speech principles will ultimately buckle under mounting pressure from advertisers and governments.
“There’s absolutely no way social media companies remain censorship resistant without moving to open protocols,” Dorsey told technology reporter Mike Solana in a wide-ranging conversation. “We need to change the foundation everything is built on.”
Dorsey pointed to vulnerabilities baked into the prevailing social media business model, which relies heavily on brand advertising revenue. He called choosing this path “the core, critical sin” during his tenure leading Twitter.
“If a brand like P&G or Unilever doesn’t like what’s happening on the platform, and they threaten to pull the budget, which accounts for like 20% of your revenue? You have no choice,” explained Dorsey. “The stock price goes from like 70 bucks to 30. Then you have employees leave because they can get greater value elsewhere, and that’s the whole conundrum you’re stuck in.”
While Dorsey expressed respect for Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech under Twitter’s new ownership as X, he believes truly censorship-resistant social media requires a deeper technological shift away from centralized control.
“X is still a corporation. It has to make a conscious choice about the rights it grants to users, based on its policies,” said Dorsey. “Elon will fight in the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he could certainly be compromised. Or something could happen to him, and then what happens to the whole platform?”
There’s absolutely no way. You’ll have phases, but that doesn’t exist forever.
– Jack Dorsey on centralized platforms avoiding censorship long-term
Dorsey sees promise in decentralized protocols like Nostr, which he now financially supports after stepping away from Bluesky, the initiative originally intended to develop an open-source protocol for Twitter. He believes Nostr’s public-private key cryptography could also offer a path to solving identity-based misinformation and impersonation as AI tools advance.
While acknowledging the user experience shortcomings of decentralized alternatives compared to mainstream offerings, Dorsey thinks they point the way forward for technology that enshrines free speech at the structural level.
“If you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that enable that and defend your rights,” he said. “Those are technologies no company or government can compromise in any way.”
Read in full: The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey [piratewires.com]
