Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s Mistakes

Without this expertise, he said he thought that the company had built incentives into the app that encouraged users and media outlets to write tweets and headlines that appealed to sensationalism instead of accuracy. At the time, he noted, he struggled to envision the app’s potential social implications — and what those design decisions might mean for “how people interrelate with one another, how people converse with one another.”

Still, he said he believed that his company had played a correlative, not a causal role in shaping public discourse — amplifying trends that existed “in parallel” to the platform.

”Abuse and harassment did not start after this polarization or the political dialogue coming on Twitter,” he said. “It’s been on the internet forever.”

Building nuance and openness into the platform’s design

Mr. Dorsey said that he, and his company, intended to learn from past mistakes.

“It would be silly for us not to change Twitter,” he said. To Mr. Dorsey, the company “should become irrelevant if it doesn’t change, if it doesn’t constantly evolve and if it doesn’t recognize gaps and opportunities to get better.”

He said he also hoped to build that openness, and admission of wrongdoing, into the platform’s discourse. “It’s important that we continue to allow the space for people to express their past and their history in context,” he said, responding to the critique that Twitter, with its limited character count and incentives for pith, promotes intolerance.

“If we can’t express that, we can’t learn from it, and then we can’t really progress,” he said, “or improve as a culture, or as individuals either.”

To do this, Mr. Dorsey said that he was considering alterations to how Twitter worked. In some iterations of the platform’s algorithm, he said, “the most salacious or controversial tweets will naturally rise to the top because those are the things that people naturally click on or share without thinking about it or reply to.”