Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, has said he is not a supporter of a permanent Twitter ban for users. Dorsey said this shortly after it was announced that the platform which he co-founded has been bought by Tesla owner Elon Musk.
“As I’ve said before, I don’t believe any permanent ban (with the exception of illegal activity) is right, or should be possible. This is why we need a protocol that’s resilient to the layers above,” said Dorsey in a Tweet.
His statement easily recalls the permanent ban placed on former US President Donald Trump. Recall that Twitter announced a permanent ban on the account of Trump following comments he made during the invasion of the Capitol Hill. His statement seemed to suggest that he supported the invasion, which caused a stir online at the time.
“Some things can be fixed immediately, and others require rethinking and reimplementing the entire system. It is important to me that we get critical feedback in all of its forms, but also important that we get the space and time to address it. All of that should be done publicly,” Dorsey added.
Earlier in the year, Twitter announced that it had permanently banned the account of Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account. Twitter said per The New York Times that Greene’s account was suspended for violating the company’s COVID-19 misinformation policies.
In the controversial tweet that got Greene’s account suspended, she tweeted falsely about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She also added a misleading chart that pulled information from a government database of unverified raw data called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. For the record, the VAERS contains a decade-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care officials.
In January, Twitter announced the permanent suspension of the account of @realDonaldTrump “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” The microblogging company said the decision was taken after a close of review of recent tweets from the account.
According to Twitter, the decision to permanently suspend @realDonaldTrump account was taken following two of his tweets, which the microblogging company claimed violated its policy.
Virtually every social media company shut out Trump at the peak of the invasion, making it almost impossible for the president to reach out to his supporters. The Twitter action did not come as a surprise; as a matter of fact, some critics have been calling for such.
