Jack Dorsey Quits Twitter and His Replacement is Far Worse
Parag Argawal hates the First Amendment
Jack Dorsey, a Bishop DuBourg High School alum, truly founded Twitter. He helped invent the microblogging platform when Evan Williams’ second startup was supposed to building a video platform to rival YouTube. The company was called Odeo.
But Dorsey’s little system to allow developers to check in with each other (‘What are you working on?' was its original placeholder text) quickly consumed the developers’ time. More work was going into Twitter than Odeo.
Williams and partner Biz Stone decided to return their investors’ money (they’d made a fortune selling Blogspot to Google), abandon Odeo, and go with Twitter.
I joined Twitter as @whennessy in 2007. At first, Twitter was my favorite social media tool. While others fell in love with Facebook, I made Twitter my go-to platform for everything Tea Party. Twitter remained my platform of choice until it became a publisher in about 2015. That’s when Dorsey, pressured by his management team, decide to begin censoring conservatives who were gaining too much popularity.
Twitter’s censorship practices eventually kicked the President of the United States off the platform and banished my new account, @hennessystl. I left the platform, and Facebook, in January 2021, though I still have an anonymous account to follow breaking news. (Nothing comes close to Twitter for breaking news. Nothing.)
Jack Dorsey quit Twitter today and named his replacement: Parag Argawal. If you cheered Dorsey’s departure, your enthusiasm was wildly misplaced. Argawal makes Jack Dorsey look like Nick Gillespie. In a famous tweet, Argawal dismissed the First Amendment completely:
[O]ur role is not to be bound by the First Amendment...focus[ing] less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.
—Twitter CEO Parag Argawal
Times have, indeed, changed. Twenty years ago, a CEO of an American company who summarily dismissed the First Amendment to the Constitution would “move on to other opportunities” as soon as HR could slap together a severance package. Today, anti-American CEOs are celebrated.
We are fortunate to have choices for microblogging today, with Gab.com, Gettr.com, and others. But we must lament the loss of common platform where people from around the world could gather to share, debate, and discover.
Yes, things have changed, Parag. They have changed for the worse. Where we once extolled virtues of open dialog to produce the best choices, narcissists like you now work to prohibit all ideas that do not conform perfectly to your own.
I look forward to Twitter’s business collapse as Parag’s “my way or the highway” approach to life leads to bad business decisions arrived at without open dialog, consideration, and experimentation. What’s bad for society is usually bad for business, and Parag Argawal is bad for everything.