Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Releases Statement Ahead of Testimony Before Congress

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has released a statement ahead of his testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee tomorrow.

In a written testimony, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stated that Twitter “does not use political ideology to make any decisions.” This is a key point ahead of Dorsey’s testimony for the House Energy and Commerce Committee tomorrow, where it is expected that political bias and censorship will be a key talking point.

In his statement, Dorsey claimed: “We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially. In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.” However, many may find this statement from Dorsey questionable given recent actions by Twitter.

Just a few days ago, Twitter claimed that their overzealous shadowbanning of certain accounts was due to a system error, in a tweet Twitter stated that accounts believed to have a “higher likelihood of being viewed as abusive” were downranked in public conversation but their system has since changed to fix this issue. Twitter did not define how they determined which accounts were abusive on their platform but did state that a “higher level of precision” was needed in determining which content to downrank.

Twitter did note that the platform would continue to factor “behavioral signals” into how they ranks tweets, in order to serve “conversational health,” but did not define what these signals are. Twitter has also previously denied taking part in any form of shadowbanning whatsoever, however now it appears that they have chosen to rename the practice “downranking” in order to come clean about their practices without admitting to taking part in a practice that they have previously denied the existence of.

Another excerpt from Dorsey’s statement reads:

Twitter has publicly committed to improving the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation on our platform. Twitter’s health is measured by how we help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking. Conversely, abuse, malicious automation, and manipulation detracts from the health of our platform. We are committed to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress of our health initiative.

Today, I hope my testimony before the Committee will demonstrate the challenges that we are tackling as a global platform. Twitter is approaching these challenges with a simple question: How do we earn more trust from the people using our service? We know the way earn more trust around how we make decisions on our platform is to be as transparent as possible. We want to communicate how our platform works in a clear and straightforward way

Dorsey’s full statement can be read below: