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

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Aug. 8, 2018 - Sean Hannity Show

16:21

EXCLUSIVE Sean's interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

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	A lot has now come up in recent days as Facebook and YouTube are banning Alex Jones and, you know, a couple of things that are in play here.
	One, people saying, well, it's a violation of First Amendment rights.
	And, well, it's they actually do.
	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 going to happen?
	You know, who gets to make these decisions?
	Who gets to decide?
	Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a decision not to ban Alex Jones.
	But then the issue of Lewis FurraCon comes up.
	And that was brought up immediately after Alex Jones.
	And then YouTube only banned part of Lewis FurraCon, not other parts of Lewis FurraCon.
	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 and 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 because of the algorithms that these guys are able to put in place.
	It raises a whole host of issues here.
	My prediction is, is that if certain people are banned, and 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.
	The things that have been said, the pictures that have been made up, the vile, vicious threats that I have received are all there.
	I tend to be myself a First Amendment absolutist.
	In other words, I think, for example, on television, on radio, 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 going to decide, well, this person stays and this person goes, and maybe they have one political bent over another political bent, I would imagine over some period of time that there's going to 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?
	What do you do in cases 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.
	It's 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 of Twitter.
	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 I appreciate you coming on 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 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 definitely not easy, but we're trying to approach this with 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 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 there's a lot of nuance 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 fallen short in terms of this particular issue?
	Well, I think the first thing is that 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 those reasons to the person who was suspended 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 guidelines that help us 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.
	Every model that we have on the network is really looking at the behaviors on the network.
	We take those behaviors as signals.
	And I do want to point out that these signals evolve 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 a conversation or to unfairly amplify their content, which they didn't earn.
	So those are the signals that factor in.
	And we do rank 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 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 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 individual.
	I think that would probably be an easy, we're not going to allow that, right?
	Yes, that is much easier.
	Any sort of violent speech, encouragement towards violence, harassment 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 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 certainly hard for humans to do.
	So we make sure that all of our folks understand the cultural context that something is said because some cultural contexts allow for some speech that enable some speech that other 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 appropriately and doing so with warnings, with notices, with a temporary lock of the account until that tweet is reviewed or deleted and ideally giving them the exact reasons why it violates.
	And you have enough people that would be able to monitor and handle that, that you won't miss threats?
	We'll certainly miss things.
	And we're certainly going to make mistakes along the way.
	That's why it's important for us to make sure that we have...
	I think it's more complicated than everybody knows here.
	Now, what do you do in the case of a figure that is known either a white racist or supremacist or a KKC member, or maybe on the other end of the spectrum, you've got Louis Furrakhan, known anti-Semite racist?
	What do you do when they set up an account?
	Is it that you monitor them?
	And 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.
	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 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.
	Some of the groups that you mentioned earlier on, there might be 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, we'll come back.
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	More with Jack Dorsey as we continue.
	And then we're going to look at the poll numbers and yesterday's election results as we continue.
	And 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, okay, how are the decisions made that some people get to post and some people, 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.
	Yeah, he said what he said about Sandy Hook.
	I've actually never really heard his show.
	I've only seen clips on like Mediaite of him.
	I don't listen to any, really anybody else's show.
	I just try to focus on my own shows.
	But now, what I think most of your Twitter people that use Twitter are probably concerned about is when 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 going to see horrific things 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 a kind of First Amendment purist in a way.
	Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things here.
	So first, yes, people should decide who they follow and who they want to hear from.
	And that's a, you know, that's a fairly mechanical action, hitting the follow button, and those tweets should appear in your timeline.
	We do try to rank them for relevance of what you think, of what the algorithm thinks based on all your behaviors, what you should see first, but everything is there.
	Second, there are areas 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.
	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 downranked.
	So they don't have to see it immediately.
	But if they want to see it, it is there.
	Are you concerned that if you make a decision, say, on Alex Jones or somebody, Louis Farrakhan is controversial?
	I'm not comparing the two in any way.
	I'm just giving two names out of a hat.
	That if this happens, do you see an alternative Twitter universe that lets it all go?
	Maybe with the exception of violence or threats to individuals.
	I mean, is that like, for example, I mean, look, at least you're willing to come on this show and answer some questions for people.
	I applaud you for that.
	Facebook and I know YouTube are in hiding right now under their desks and they don't want to respond.
	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 going to come up and say, we're going to 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 enumerated a number of them around violent threats or giving up personal information around someone's home or office or identifiable information 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.
	Well, I mean, we do believe in the power of free expression, but we also need to balance that with the fact that bad faith actors intentionally try to silence other voices.
	And that is not the way they want 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 okay.
	But it's just a question of how we balance these aspects.
	And to answer your question, I think the only way to do this and 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 work worth doing because people need to see the whys and the reasons behind our actions or inactions.
	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 or 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, which I could see happening.
	But anyway, Jack Dorsey at Jack on Twitter, the CEO of Twitter.
	Thank you for being with us, and we really do appreciate you taking the time.
	Thank you for the opportunity and the time.
	All right, 800-941, Sean, our toll-free telephone number.
	You want to be a part of the program, news roundup, information overload.
	We'll look at yesterday's election results, what they mean.

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