Jack Dorsey agrees with Elon Musk on reversing Donald Trump’s Twitter ban

New Delhi: Tesla CEO Elon Musk termed Twitter’s decision to ban former US President Donald Trump from the platform “foolish in the extreme”. Musk said he would lift the ban on Trump and hinted that Twitter under him do away with permanent bans or at least make them extremely rare.

Musk said permanent bans “fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter and is a morally bad decision”.

The former US president was banned from Twitter in January 2021 after his supporters stormed the US Capitol and attempted to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.

While many people may disagree with the Tesla boss, he once again found a strong supporter in Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Responding to a tweet by Axios business editor Dan Primack, Dorsey said he regretted the ban and agreed that there shouldn’t be permanent bans for individual Twitter users.

“Musk says @jack agrees with him that there shouldn’t be permanent bans on individual Twitter users. Reminder that Dorsey was CEO when such bans were implemented,” Primack tweeted.

Dorsey replied, “I do agree. There are exceptions (CSE, illegal behaviour, spam or network manipulation, etc), but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work.”

Dorsey added that banning Trump was a “business decision”.

“It was a business decision, it shouldn’t have been. And we should always revisit our decisions and evolve as necessary. I stated in that thread and still believe that permanent bans of individuals are directionally wrong,” Dorsey said.

In a series of tweets, Dorsey said that banning Trump was “the right decision for Twitter” since the company was facing “an extraordinary and untenable circumstance” that forced a narrow focus on “public safety”. “Permanent bans just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter as a town square where everyone can voice their opinion,” he added.

He also linked to a thread he wrote on the subject soon after Trump was banned, in which he called for a “resilient social media protocol”.

Even if the ban is lifted, Trump has said he will not return to Twitter, having launched his own social media company, Truth Social.

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