It was only 11 years ago that Jack Dorsey first sent a message via the experimental messaging platform that would be known as Twitter. He thought of it as a real-time status tool—a kind of smoke signal that would let your friends know where you were, what was on your mind, and whether you hiccuped. He did not imagine that one day the President of the United States would use it to mock beauty queens, misrepresent his electoral victory, and offend international allies and foes alike.
Today Dorsey is pleased that Twitter quickly evolved to become a worldwide means of surfacing the zeitgeist in real time. He is much less pleased that it has been used to harass women. And though Twitter has grown to a public company worth $10 billion, that’s a big drop from the $48 billion Wall Street valuation after its 2013 IPO. It has over 300 million regular users, and today reported that the number is on the rise, growing by nine million in the last quarter—but critics gripe that growth has been stagnant, and Facebook has almost 2 billion!
I’ve known Dorsey for more than a decade, and followed him as he left the company, returned in 2011, and became the CEO (again) in 2015, adding that job to his CEO post at Square, the payments company he founded. Soft-spoken and unflappable, he has made significant product changes in recent months (a ranked timeline as opposed to pure chronology, a number of features to improve safety) — and has had the dubious pleasure of seeing Donald Trump use Twitter as his personal megaphone, for good and ill (mostly ill). I recently sat down with him at Twitter’s New York City office. We discussed how he is addressing Twitter’s harassment problem, what he is doing to make the company grow again, and, of course, the tweeting president.
Steven Levy: When did you realize that Trump was going to use Twitter as a central platform for communicating?
Jack Dorsey: He’d been using it as a central platform for his communication since 2011, 2012. He hasn’t really changed his behavior. He has been fairly consistent; he just changed what role he is speaking for. But, like, his tweets today are consistent with his tweets back in 2011-2012.
But weren’t you surprised that he kept doing that as a candidate and then as a president?
I wasn’t surprised. If you were him, why change the momentum of what made you win in the first place?
Now that he has won, there’s a question of whether Twitter should hold a president accountable to the same standards as other users. At Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees he was not going to censor a nominee’s—and then a president’s—posts. Did you have to make a decision on that?
I think it’s really important that we maintain open channels to our leaders, whether we like what they’re saying or not, because I don’t know of another way to hold them accountable. Any time we have any leader tweet, including Trump, there’s a very interesting and thriving conversation. A mixture of fact checking, disagreement, agreement, and some random things.
We hold all accounts to the same standards on our policy, and we want to make sure that independent of who you are or where you’re coming from, you understand the guidelines, what our policies are, and what that means. We now have 11 years of a corpus of opinions, statements, emotions, facts, falsehoods—everything you can imagine. It’s all archived in the Library of Congress, as well, in real time. It’s really interesting right now that people are taking the present day and going back to previous statements. So the public nature of the platform, and the fact that tweets stick around, is becoming critical to accountability.
If someone complained about a Trump tweet, would you conceivably say, “This is unacceptable,” and then block the President of the United States?
We are going to hold all accounts to the same standards. Our policy does [account for] newsworthiness as well, and that was requested by our policy team. So we’re not taking something down that people should be able to report on and actually show that this is what the source said. It’s really important to make sure that we provide that source for the right reporting, and to minimize bias in articles.
Does Twitter have a relationship with the administration?
We have a policy team that speaks with them like we do with every government. It’s no different today than it was two years ago or eight years ago or with governments all over the world.
Have you personally met Trump?
No.
You are the CEO of two major companies. How come you’re not one of the leaders we see in some of these meetings?
I don’t know. You’d have to ask them why not.
You weren’t invited to any of these roundtables or advisory councils?
No, we weren’t invited. I don’t know the reason.
If you had been invited, would you have gone?
It’s really a question of whether we would add value, and if we thought that we could bring what we believe in to the table—and whether that would make the conversation better. We don’t have to be invited to these things to show our stances and to participate. We can take action and we can make statements about what we believe, and where we think the government is doing the right thing according to our beliefs, and where we disagree. That doesn’t require an invite or a roundtable to do that — that’s part of the power of our platform.
Let’s move on from Trump and more to Twitter. Lately, a lot of people have been alleging that social media, including Twitter, has degraded the quality of public discourse. What do you think?
You can have conversation that’s distracting and you can have conversation that is focusing. I don’t think it’s a matter of the tool — it’s how people use the tool. Could we encourage better usage of Twitter through changing the product? Absolutely. We are always going to be looking for opportunities to make it easier, but also to show what matters faster. We moved from a completely time-ordered, reverse-chronological timeline to actually bubbling up what you should be seeing and what matters according to our understanding of what you’re interested in—and potentially showing the other side of what you’re interested in, as well. One of the values Twitter espouses is that it can show every side of a debate. I get the New York Times and I follow Fox, too, because I just want to challenge what I’m seeing. And that’s awesome. Whether you choose to dive into it or not is really up to you. We’re not going to force that on people.
But do you think Silicon Valley has worsened the divide?
It’s not just technology companies that are out of touch with a big part of the country and the world. I think it’s all of us. I think this city is out of touch with Missouri, where I’m from, and other people in areas like that. It is our responsibility to help bridge some of those gaps, because we’re building tools that people are using on a daily basis to connect with each other and to see the world. If we’re only fulfilling their bias, then we’re doing the wrong thing. We feel that burden and we want to help fix it. And the only way we can do that is by talking with people. So we go out of our way to listen and to have real conversations, not just seeing what people are saying on Twitter but actually bringing people in and interviewing them and talking about what they like and what they don’t like and what they are experiencing. The question I ask of anyone I meet who uses Twitter is: How do you use it, and why?
And what do you learn?
Most recently people tell me they see what’s happened in the world on it. We also hear about these niche communities that are supportive. I hadn’t known this existed, but there’s a massive diabetic community on Twitter that is extremely supportive. I found this out in Dublin, of all places.
So yeah, there’s a role and a responsibility. We need to do our part to help set expectations of what this technology can do for the world and the impact it’ll have. When our Treasury Secretary says machine learning and AI are not going to impact jobs for fifty to a hundred years, I find that to be irresponsible. And I think we need to help.
You’ve done a number of things over the past few months about trying to decrease the destructive speech and attacks on Twitter. By your metrics, which of those things seem to be working the best?
In the past we were super mechanical about helping people report or avoid harassment or abuse on the platform, so that if they wanted to see something they’d have to do a little bit of work. Before, there was just no filter whatsoever. Everything would just come at you directly. So the most impactful change has actually been applying more machine learning to the platform so we can do more of the work [in blocking harassing tweets] and then enable people who want to see everything to take the next step to actually see it. This is very different from our past.
There have been well-publicized instances where women have been exposed to horrible treatment. What was your feeling when you understood how common it was for women like Leslie Jones to be harassed? Did you feel that was something that you failed at?
We recognized that the very nature of the product was giving unfair advantage to people who wanted to harass. So we needed to change the product experience. We made it a priority last year, but to be very frank and honest, we only shipped one meaningful thing all year. So our progress is not something that we are proud of.
Why was that? Why did you fall short?
A variety of reasons. We recognized that at the end of the year, in December, and we just took on a completely different mindset. We had people drop what they were doing and really focus on this as an issue. And in the past three months we’ve been shipping every single day against this, and I think have made meaningful progress, [even though] it’s not felt as much. We also, in the previous year, put a lot of burden on the victim instead of taking the burden upon ourselves. So we learned a bunch in that past year around how slow we were, and we just completely shifted our mindset.
There’s not going to be an endpoint where we can say we’re done. But the progress we’ve made in the past few months has just been phenomenal. It just took a mindset shift, and we had to go through that year of really learning that and the previous years before that. We didn’t prioritize it in the right way, but now we have. So I feel like we have a real strong handle on what it is and, most importantly, how to bring it into a steady state instead of it being an emergency state.
You have always maintained you could handle two CEO jobs, at Twitter and Square. Because it took until relatively recently for you to prioritize a situation that was going on for years, would it be fair to say that in this case you didn’t have your eye on the ball?
When I got back in, we made it a priority. We recognized that it was an issue immediately, but that doesn’t mean that we necessarily had the right execution. But making it a priority and executing it the right way are two different things. We needed to do both. So did we have our eye off the ball in terms of execution? Yes. But as a priority? No. We knew it was something that we needed to fix and address. But sometimes you get the execution right and sometimes you get it wrong. We shouldn’t feel bad about that, because if we do, we’re not going to try new things.
How important is it that Twitter itself grow its numbers in a significant way?
First and foremost, we need to make sure that we’re focused on the people we have and [that] we’re serving them better. We’re not here to provide something that people use once a month; we are here to provide something that provides daily utility, people checking multiple times a day to figure out what’s going on. So we re-cast how we measure ourselves internally, around providing daily utility to people. And as a daily utility to [not only] people on the service but also this massive audience [who see tweets outside the product]—we have one of the biggest audiences in the world through the syndication audience. If we serve those people better, that audience naturally grows.
By the way, we are growing again. We’ve been saying for three earnings calls in a row now that we have seen accelerating growth after a deceleration. So we managed to change the slope of the curve. The most responsible thing to do was to show that product changes, like the timeline, would actually result in more people wanting to use it, and wanting to use it more. It was going like this [Dorsey makes a horizontal motion], it’s going like this again [Dorsey points his fingers up and his hand towards the ceiling]. For the first time in a long time, we have shown causation between product changes we’ve made and actually more people valuing it and wanting to use it more and more and more. So the most important thing for me and for us as a company was to get back to growth—and not just growth, but accelerating growth. We did that, and it took a year and a half. I don’t know if many other turnarounds have done it that quickly. We focused on what mattered and that gave us more breathing room to focus now on some things that might have similar upsides, but may not. We needed that core to work, and now it’s working and it’s because of the product changes we’re making instead of things happening to us.
Will Twitter five years from now be a dramatically different experience?
We’ve had people say that if you look at Twitter today and you look at Twitter eight years ago, it looks the same. But if you really dig into it, it’s completely different.
Really?
It’s completely different.
Maybe visually, in the sense that you see videos and —
People focus on the visual instead of the mechanics underneath. The biggest thing that we’ve ever done to the product is ranking the timeline. That was fundamental. And the reason we did it is because we saw people have to do a bunch of work to find tweets that they were interested in. So we applied machine learning to the timeline for the first time in the company’s history. As people see tweets that matter to them more, they want to tweet more about them, reply to them.
Twitter’s live video focus was the Thursday night NFL games. Amazon now has the contract. Are you still going to pursue live video?
Yeah. The NFL was the start of a strategy around a pattern we saw for 10 years — people tweeting about what they were seeing on television, or at events. So the most important thing there was the conversation. We wanted to deliver an experience where I didn’t have to go find a TV [to see a live event], I could just see it right there — I could be on a bus; I could be on a subway. We invested heavily in technology that compresses video live and digitally reconstructs it so that even if you’re on an edge network or on, like, an iPhone 5, you’ll have HD-like quality video. That was the start of our strategy. The NFL brought a lot of attention, but the strategy is around news, sports, entertainment, and business because that’s what people are talking about on Twitter. The NFL is going to Amazon, but the conversation will still be on Twitter.
Despite the results you cite, Twitter is very much on the spot. Are you feeling the pressure?
Good pressure. It’s always good pressure. Look, this company is so important—not only to me, but to the world. It plays a really critical role in the world. A more open exchange of information is our purpose, and it’s a noble one. I want to make sure I’m doing whatever it takes to make sure that we serve that purpose.
