Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has confessed that permanently banning then-President Donald Trump from his social media giant was a wrong decision.
On Tuesday, the tech titan admitted it was a wrong move after Elon Musk, Twitter’s presumptive new owner, said he would reverse Trump’s Twitter ban once he officially becomes the social media platform’s new owner. Dorsey agreed that there shouldn’t be permanent bans.
“I do agree,” tweeted Dorsey, who was still at the helm when Trump was banned in January 2021 at the end of his presidency.
He said there “are exceptions,” listing sexual exploitation of children, illegal behavior or network manipulation.
“But generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work,” he said.
Dorsey also said he agreed with another Twitter user who tweeted that it’s “short-sighted’ for “a handful of social media companies” to act as “gatekeepers to political discourse.”
“It was a business decision, it shouldn’t have been,” Dorsey wrote of Trump’s ban, saying he believes that “permanent bans of individuals are directionally wrong.”
Dorsey also replied to another user about Trump’s ban that “businesses should not be making these decisions.”
“I’m saying a corporation should not have to make this decision in the first place. [N]ot for something as important as public conversation,” Dorsey wrote.
Dorsey’s admission attracted widespread support, with many saying he should have realized the error while still at the head of the company.
Dorsey swiftly dismissed one comment from a user who asked why it was “so wrong” to ban someone from a social media platform when people are commonly banned from gathering places “like a bar or a ballpark.”
“Twitter isn’t a bar,” Dorsey noted bluntly.
Despite Elon Musk’s vow to unban Trump’s Twitter account, the former president has said he won’t return, instead touting his own social media platform, Truth Social — which Musk wittily said should have been named “Trumpet.”
