As the man who gives a global platform to Trump’s tweets, Jack Dorsey’s company sometimes looks like it is helping Atwood’s dark visions come to pass
In the odd-couple pairing of Margaret Atwood and Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, Atwood is the true visionary.
But as they spoke to an audience of creative media types, you could not escape the sense that Atwood was second billing. Dorsey drew this crowd. There is more to Twitter than cutesy ironic pseudo-controversies, however, and in Tuesday’s conversation these got short shrift. When Atwood was asked why Twitter had changed from the more carefree and fun early years, she offered that it might be because politics has changed, because “people got worked up about issues and started yelling at each other,” she said. “It might be that.”
Asked why Twitter still permits white supremacist content, for example, now that Facebook has announced a ban on it, Dorsey said it is harder to police “ideology” than specific behavior, such as abuse directed at individuals. So his answer involved tweaks to Twitter’s display, such as the prominence of statistics, which he claimed had positive behavioural effects.
When moderator Nam Kiwanuka started to describe the racist abuse she receives on Twitter, Atwood was almost dismissive, suggesting people were calling her names like “poopoohead.”
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