Sean Hannity Show - *EXCLUSIVE* Sean's interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 8, 2018 - Sean Hannity Show

16:13

EXCLUSIVE Sean's interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	This is an iHeart Podcast.
	A lot has now come up in recent days as Facebook and YouTube are banning Alex Jones and you know the couple of things that are in play here.
	Um one people saying, well, it's a violation of First Amendment rights.
	And well, it's uh they actually do, it's it's not really a First Amendment issue in the sense that as long as it's not government censoring, these are companies, and if companies make decisions that they don't like the content, but the question is what's gonna happen, you know, who gets to make these decisions?
	Who gets to decide?
	Um Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey uh made a decision not to ban Alex Jones.
	Um, but then the issue of Lewis Farrakhan comes up, and that was brought up immediately after Alex Jones, and then YouTube only banned part of uh Lewis Farrakhan, not other parts of Lewis Farrakhan.
	And I think what you've got here, very complicated issue, then the issue of shadow banning or stealth banning or ghost banning or comment ghosting is what it's an act basically that some companies have used to block a user in their content from the online community, such that yeah, they might have put it up there, but there's no way anybody could either see it or spread it uh because of the algorithms that these guys are able to put in place.
	It raises a whole host of issues here.
	Um my prediction is is that if certain people are banned, and let's listen, if you're on any social media, you know how vile it can get.
	And I'll just speak for myself and my experience, uh the things that have been said, the pictures that have been made up, the vile, vicious threats that I have received are all there.
	Um I I tend to be myself a First Amendment absolutist.
	In other words, I think, for example, on television, on radio, on uh and on social media, we all make decisions about the content that we choose to engage in.
	In other words, you are the final arbiter.
	And if these companies are gonna decide, well, this person stays and this person goes, and maybe they have one political bent over another political vent uh bent, I would imagine over some period of time that there's gonna be alternative competitors that allow everybody to say pretty much anything they want.
	Now it gets more complicated.
	What if somebody is giving out instructions like years ago the Anarchist Cookbook was a big controversy?
	What if you're teaching people how to build bombs to hurt people?
	Uh what do you do in cases if if people are making direct threats?
	What do you do with people that are just plain absolute hate racists, bigots, anti-Semites?
	What do you do in that case?
	Where does the line get drawn?
	It's not the simple, is not as simple when you really want to have an honest discussion about it as it may seem on the surface.
	Anyway, it's his first and I think it's going to be his only interview.
	Jack Dorsey is the CEO uh of Twitter.
	Um I really appreciate you coming on because I'm sure this is probably the last thing you want to do is come on my radio program.
	But uh I appreciate you coming on and and answering the questions.
	You have decided not to ban Alex Jones in his particular case.
	Your argument was he hasn't violated your rules, but I think this is far more complicated uh than I think some people might understand.
	How are you?
	Well, thank you, Sean, for the first for the opportunity to talk with your listeners and also painting a picture of the complexities that we're facing.
	This is uh definitely not easy, but we're we're trying to approach this with uh a very simple principle is how do we earn more trust?
	And the way for us to earn more trust around how we make decisions, the algorithms that um help us enforce these decisions is try to be as open as possible about them.
	We haven't done a great job at that in the past.
	We're trying to communicate a lot more in a clear and straightforward way, but uh there's a lot a lot of nuance uh in everything that we're facing, and we want to make sure that where have you not done a good job, Jack?
	Where do you think you've you've fallen short in terms of this particular issue?
	Well, I think the I think the first thing is uh we you know in the past we did not communicate why we would take action on tweets or why we might suspend temporarily or permanently.
	We want to communicate that those reasons to the person who was suspended or or tweets in question, and also the reporters.
	So simple communication within the product, but more broadly, we haven't done a great job at communicating our principles, the the you know, the guidelines that help us um make the decisions in the first place.
	So we're getting better and better step by step, but we have a lot more work to do there.
	Let me ask about specific questions.
	Has Twitter ever been involved in shadow banning?
	We do not shadow ban according to political ideology or viewpoint or content, period.
	We every model that we have on the network uh is really looking at the behaviors on the network.
	Uh we take those behaviors as signals.
	And I do want to point out that these signals evolve uh minute like minute by minute, hourly by hourly.
	These are not scarlet permanent letters that people then take on as a badge and will never be ranked high in search or not allowed to trend or ranked high in conversation.
	So these are models that are looking at behaviors and behaviors of bad faith actors who intend to manipulate, distract, divide uh a conversation, um, or to unfairly amplify their content, which they didn't earn.
	So those are the signals that factor in.
	Uh and and we do rank uh search, we do rank trends, and we do rank conversations accordingly.
	That does not affect one's timeline.
	If you follow someone on Twitter, you're going to see them in your timeline.
	Now we do uh rank the timeline for relevance, so it might take some scrolling to see everything.
	But you can also turn that ranking off in the settings so you can see everything in recency order.
	What about, and I I think this might be something everybody agrees on.
	Let's start with people that are calling for some type of violence of any kind or threatening violence against an inju individual.
	I think that would probably be an easy, we're not going to allow that, right?
	Yes, that that is much easier.
	Any sort of uh violent speech encouragement towards violence, uh harassment uh is directly against our terms of service, and we take immediate action on it.
	What if somebody now it gets more nuanced?
	Oh, I wish somebody would just punch Hannity in the face.
	What do you do then?
	Well, we have to in in all these considerations, not to get into specifics, we have to take the context.
	We have to really understand what the context of the conversation is.
	And this is extremely hard for an algorithm to do and and certainly hard for for humans to do.
	So we make sure that all of our folks understand the cultural context that something is said.
	Uh because some cultural contexts allow for some speech that uh enable some speech that other cultural cultural contexts don't.
	So as we review cases of reports or blocks or mutes, we have to make sure that we're taking into consideration that context and then acting acting appropriately.
	And doing so with with warnings, with notices, with uh a temporary lock of the account until that tweet is reviewed or or deleted, and ideally giving them the exact reasons why it violates or you have enough people that would be able to monitor and handle that that you won't miss threats?
	We'll certainly miss things.
	Um we're we're certainly going to make mistakes along the way.
	That's why it's important for us to make sure that we have to do that.
	Yeah, I think it's more complicated than everybody knows here.
	Now, what do you do in the case of uh a figure that is known either a white racist or supremacist or KKK member or maybe on the other end of the spectrum, you've got Lewis Farrakhan, known anti-Semite racist.
	What do you do when they set up an account?
	Um is it that you you now you monitor them and if if it's a certain video that they're linking to, if it's a certain article that has racist ramblings in it, then it becomes a little again, it becomes a little more nuanced sometimes, or maybe somebody is an overt racist and they use horrible language, and then maybe somebody is more subtle and they use code language that is racist.
	It's it in that sense, you know, it becomes harder, does it?
	Does it not?
	It does become it does become harder.
	But so we rely on a bunch of signals, including reports um from those who that account might attack or from bystanders.
	And then we also take into consideration, again, the context of everything that's happening around it.
	Uh some of the uh groups that you mentioned earlier on, there might be uh violent extremist groups that try to get onto our service, and we take that into consideration.
	We also look in those particular cases at off-platform behavior as well.
	So things that aren't just happening on Twitter, but happening on other platforms or in the real world.
	All right.
	Well, at Jack, by the way, if you ever want to write the CEO of Twitter, and I know you're trying to respond to many people because I've seen your account.
	Uh we'll come back.
	Uh I want to discuss the slippery slope aspect of this, if it's political content or controversial content and how do you make decisions on those things.
	Uh listen, I want to remind everybody you got to protect your home.
	You got to protect your family.
	I've got the latest greatest best technology ever, and that's Simply Safe Home Security.
	And it's just a great security system.
	And they have literally transformed the entire industry.
	By the way, um, Simply Safe is now valued at over a billion dollars.
	When they started on this program, they had six employees.
	That's it.
	I've known them for a long time.
	And the best part is you get rid of all installation fees, you get rid of all of those contracts that you have to sign.
	Uh you don't have these monthly uh bills that are just extraordinarily high and simply safe now works.
	Millions of us now use it to protect our homes and families.
	You get protection against intruders, fires, leaks, busted pipes, and simply safe home security.
	It'll work during a power outage, downed Wi-Fi, even if a burglar smashes your keypad.
	The system is easy to install, easy to use, only takes minutes.
	And guess what?
	If you move, you take the system with you.
	That's how good it is.
	CNET, PC Mag, wire cutter, all names simply safe.
	They're top pick now for home security.
	And you get all of that, and it's only 1499 a month, and you don't have to bust up every wall in your house.
	Simply safe Hannity.com to protect your home and your family, and you save 10%.
	That's simply safehannity.com.
	Simply safe Hannity.com.
	More with Jack Dorsey uh as we continue, and then we're gonna look at the poll numbers and yesterday's election results as we can take.
	As we continue, Jack Dorsey is with us.
	He is the CEO of Twitter at Jack is his handle if you want to write him about any of the issues we're discussing as it relates to uh okay, what uh how are the decisions made that some people get to post and some people Well, let me ask you about this particular case.
	I know people there are a lot of people that like Alex Jones.
	He has a fairly significant audience.
	Uh yeah, he said what he said about Sandy Hook.
	I've I've actually never really heard his show.
	I've only seen clips on like media it of him.
	Uh I don't listen to any really anybody else's show.
	I just try to focus on my own shows.
	But now it uh what I think most of your Twitter people that use Twitter are probably concerned about is when where it's a slippery slope.
	You know, who gets to decide what's controversial content?
	Who gets to decide what gets pulled off and what doesn't get pulled off?
	Who gets to decide any of this?
	Isn't there an argument to be made, Jack, that the people should decide, meaning they don't have to go to that Twitter account.
	They don't have to read certain things.
	And from my own experience, you can go look at my timeline, and I promise you you're gonna see horrific things uh about me.
	And by the way, they make up what do you call these things, memes that they make up?
	You know, they're pretty vicious and hostile.
	I prefer my kids not see them, but I'm uh kind of First Amendment purist in a way.
	Yeah, I mean I I I think there's a I think there's a few things here.
	So first, um, yes, uh people should decide who they follow and who they want to hear from.
	And that's uh, you know, that's a fairly mechanical action, hitting the follow button and and those tweets should appear in your timeline.
	We do try to rank them for relevance of what you think uh of of what the IRM thinks based on all your behaviors, what you should see first, but everything is there.
	Second, there are there are areas of the of the service like search and trends and replies where anyone can inject themselves.
	And one of the things that we have noticed is there are certain behaviors that silence speech.
	Uh they they silence voices.
	And we want to make sure that people have a lot more control over their experience to make sure if they want to engage in that sort of conversation, they're able to, but if they don't, it's downright.
	Um so they don't have to see it immediately, but if they want to see it, it is it is there.
	So that's are you concerned that if you make a decision, say on Alex Jones or somebody, Lewis Farrakhan is controversial.
	I'm not comparing the two on any, I'm just giving two names just out of a hat.
	That if if this happens, do you see an alternative Twitter universe that lets it all go?
	Maybe with the exception of violence or threats uh to individuals.
	I mean, is that like for example, I I mean, look, at least you're willing to come on this show and answer some questions for people.
	I I applaud you for that.
	Facebook and uh I know YouTube, you know, have are in hiding right now under their desks and they don't want to respond.
	Um and I think you deserve a lot of credit for that, but you know what I'm asking here.
	I mean, is there a competitor that's gonna come up and say, we're gonna let everybody say whatever they want to say, too bad, as long as it's not a threat.
	Well I think there's always boundaries to that.
	I mean you you enumerated a number of them around violent threats or giving up personal information around someone's home or office or uh identifiable information that that people could utilize to put them in real physical harm.
	So we need to balance all of those constraints.
	We've tried to codify them into our terms of service.
	Those terms of service are a contract that we have with people signing up to the service.
	These are the rules of the road and if you're and you have you're allowed as a private company, even a public company to set up standards and rules.
	This is not about freedom of speech where the government is intervening, correct?
	Right.
	But we also need to balance that with the fact that bad faith actors intentionally try to silence other voices.
	And and that is not to freely express themselves.
	I bet you over the years have gotten people to say hey you need to ban Sean Hannity is that true?
	I haven't heard those requests directly but I'm sure someone is saying it somewhere.
	But that's that's well that's okay but it's you know it's it's just a question of like how we how we balance these these aspects and to answer your question I think the only way to do this in earn trust is to be open about it and to work really hard to explain why we make decisions, how our algorithms make decisions, which is even more complicated and more nuanced, but it's it's work worth doing because people need to see the whys and the reasons behind our actions or inaction I honestly applaud you.
	I know these other guys are hiding under their desks.
	And you know what?
	I know some people will like what you have to say and not like what you have to say.
	But I appreciate your approach of dealing with this directly.
	I will offer the show to you, my TV show, anytime you want, because I think it's an important issue.
	And I do think it is far more complicated and far more nuanced than maybe some of the headlines I've been reading.
	But I am concerned if it's going to turn into a ban-only conservative issue.
	issue which I could see happening.
	Uh but anyway Jack Dorsey at Jack on Twitter, the CEO of Twitter, uh thank you for being with us.
	Uh and we really do appreciate you taking the time.
	Thank you for the opportunity and the time.

▲