Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: Conservative Employees ‘Don’t Feel Safe To Express Opinions’

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted during an interview with Recode that “conservative-leaning” employees at the company “don’t feel safe to express their opinions,” and “feel silenced.”

After admitting that Twitter’s employees are largely left-wing, Dorsey claimed, “I mean, we have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company.”

“They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right,” he continued. “We should make sure that everyone feels safe to express themselves within the company, no matter where they come from and what their background is.”

During the interview, Dorsey also claimed that he didn’t consider Twitter to be “neutral,” but declared, “because we’re used as a public square, they expect to have the same sort of, well, they have the same sort of expectations they would have of a public square, like Bryant Park.”

“We value health in dialogue so that is our singular objective right now, is to increase the health of how people participate in our public square,” he expressed. “We are going to make it our objective to increase the collective health. We realize not everyone is going to choose health in the short term, but we want to demonstrate by choosing healthy conduct. We can further amplify your reach, but if you don’t, it’s only your earned audience and if you’re harassing people, then we’re going to ask you to leave.”

Dorsey also spoke about “Black Twitter,” proclaiming, “Black Twitter is extremely conversational and very much used like we are a text messaging app but the whole world can join in. I just think that’s so fascinating.”

“That is why I say like news and entertainment are byproducts of conversation, and vice versa. Sometimes something is happening in the world and I see it outside, like a plane landing in the Hudson, and I have a conversation about it and sometimes I have a conversation, and that becomes the news,” he explained.

Towards the end of the interview, Dorsey expressed his belief that Twitter has “definitely been gamed.”

“I do think we have an advantage of everything being on the surface and I would hate to lose that. So that is not something that I rest on because we have definitely been gamed, and we have definitely been utilized to manipulate people,” remarked Dorsey. “I think that intention will only grow. I think people continue to find new ways of like we saw the Russian government during 2016. We just disclosed evidence of folks in Iran taking on similar patterns and I’m certain it’ll continue to happen within the borders of this country and countries around the world. But this is where the organizing principle of a nation state doesn’t work because these are going to be global issues and require global solutions. We need to prioritize those global solutions first.”