Jack Dorsey, the billionaire CEO of Twitter and Square, once wore designer suits and sneakers. Now he looks like George Harrison after he met the Maharishi. His current style is fitting, as he nods empathetically in podcast studios across the country. Some have been skeptical about The Jack Dorsey Apology Tour, but Twitter's stock jumped over 15% in response to its quarterly earnings yesterday.
Hiding behind a bushy beard and a beanie, woke Dorsey sat onstage at TED last week like an unruly teen the janitor caught vandalizing the high school gym. At one point during the interview, a stream of live Tweets filled the screens behind him. Ironically, Twitter users proceeded to harass Dorsey to express their frustration with harassment and abuse on the platform.
While this demonstrates how broken social media is in 2019, Twitter's stock performed well in response to its earnings report. The company seems to have made progress when it comes to abuse. In its Q1 2019 Letter to Shareholders, Twitter claims, "Our initial focus is on those types of abuse most likely to result in severe and immediate harm. As a result, improvements in Q1 emphasized proactive detection of rule violations and physical, or off-platform, safety — including making it easier to report Tweets that share personal information, helping us remove 2.5 times more of this content." The company also claims that 38% of abusive Tweets are now flagged for review by machine learning.
This must be rewarding for Dorsey. Not just because one of his companies made substantive improvements to its platform, but because it reflects well on Dorsey's recent press activity. It's unclear whether it was his interviews that brought people back to Twitter, or if users just engaged with the platform in higher numbers due to the safety improvements. Either way, his appearance at TED was the culmination of months of interviews, just a week before the company announced its quarterly earnings.
The Techlash Media Tour
Even though media appearances are often used to promote a new product, Twitter tried something that seems to have worked. In response to the Techlash (the overdue backlash directed at big tech companies), Dorsey went on this tour to publicize Twitter's efforts to resolve the issues its platform faced.
Dorsey went on all the big podcasts. He did Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and Bill Simmons. He also did an interview with Rolling Stone for readers. Throughout these interviews, Dorsey expressed a constructive attitude, while admitting some problems were too big for any one company to fix. As less tech savvy hosts demanded hard deadlines for change, Dorsey explained the nature of research and development.
Just because a product team can release a major update every day, that doesn't mean it's a smart idea. Twitter has so many users that it would be too risky to overhaul the platform over night. It has to A/B test, which means rolling out minor changes to select users over time. Once the product team collects enough data, it can make an informed decision. Even then, the changes must be surgical, incremental improvements. That's why it's so impressive that Twitter has reduced abuse as much as it has in the last year.
Due to nuanced explanations like this, tech CEOs usually limit their exposure to the public. Just last year, the SEC sued Elon Musk for his "funding secured" Tweet. In an interview with Kara Swisher, Mark Zuckerberg was a little too sympathetic to holocaust deniers. Given the liability involved, it was actually kind of bold for Dorsey to throw on a beanie and jump behind the mic for months on end.
Dorsey was most spellbinding on Rogan's podcast. His first appearance was solid, but his second appearance (a month later) was special. Vijaya Gadde, a high-ranking legal executive at Twitter, joined him. It was like a battle royale because Rogan also invited a confrontational journalist named Tim Pool to debate the Twitter execs.
As Pool lobbed accusations of unconscious liberal bias, Dorsey sat calmly in his craft beer hat, while Gadde set the record straight. It had the tone of a contentious deposition and lasted for over three hours. It's hard to digest in one sitting. While the discussion is somewhat circular, it's informative.
The newsworthy conversation has always happened on Twitter. Facebook has more users and Instagram skews younger, but Twitter has influence. As Facebook's shady corporate practices taint the public's perception of their brand, Twitter has a chance to redeem itself, if not set itself apart in a positive way.
