Media

Twitter CEO Uses Twitter to Talk About Company's Rules on Enforcing Its Own Policies

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: October 14, 2017 8:30 am

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 7:11 am

Twitter Inc.’s (NASDAQ: TWTR) chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, must believe the service reaches enough people that he can use it to announce changes in its policy. His most recent comments were about enforcement of Twitter’s policy about what people and organizations cannot say on Twitter. The tweets are in reaction to hate speech and discussions of violence. Recently there has been a battle about this kind of communication, and who can react to it on Twitter without being “silenced.”

@TwitterSafety Twitter’s Safety operation posted the first tweet about the issue:

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/918502757102903296

Dorsey (@jack) had to break his comments into eight tweets because of Twitter’s rules that tweets can only be 140 characters.

2/ We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough.

— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017

4/ Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough.

— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017

6/ We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.

— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017

8/ These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week.

— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017

Twitter will have problems following these tweets, just as Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) will have trouble following and deleting similar comments. These companies have such vast network and so many communications across hundreds of millions of members. Jack Dorsey thinks the best way to reach them is via Twitter. A press release won’t do.