How Jack Dorsey Feels About Government Regulation of Twitter | JRE Twitter Special

Do you think you can hold off regulation though? Do you think that by these approaches and by being proactive and by taking a stand and perhaps offering up a road to redemption to these people and making clear distinctions between what you're what you're allowing what you're not allowing you can hold off regulation or do you disagree with what he's saying about regulation? No, I don't believe that should be our goal is to hold off regulation I believe we should be we should participate like any other citizen whether it be a corporate citizen or individual citizen in Hoping to guide the right regulation So are you familiar and I could be wrong on this because it's been like 15 years since I've done this Are you familiar with the clean water restoration act at all? I don't expect it to be it's a very specific thing So it was at some point in like the early 70s There was a river in Ohio and again, I could be wrong has been 15 years I used to work for an environmental organization started on fire and What was typically told to us was that all of these different companies said we're doing the right thing But this like as I mentioned the snowflake doesn't blame itself So over time the river was so polluted it became sludge and lit on fire and so someone said if all of these companies think they're doing the right thing and They've all just contributed to this nightmare We need to tell them blanket regulation and so what I see with these companies like banking institutions public discourse platforms video distribution I actually I'm really worried about what regulation will look like because I think the government is gonna you know But I think there's going to be a recoil of First I think the Republicans because I watched the testimony you had in Congress and I thought they had no idea what they're talking about Nor did they care there was like a couple people who made good points, but for the most part They were like I don't whatever and they asked about Russia and stuff So they have no idea what's going on But there'll come a time when you know for instance one of the one of the great things they brought up was that By default when someone in DC signs up they see way more Democrats than Republicans, right? You remember that when you testified? Yeah, so well that there's an issue and I don't think I believe you when you say it's algorithmic that these are high You know prominent individuals so they get automatically recommended But then they're you know So again the solution to that like how do you regulate a programmer to create an algorithm to solve that problem is is crazy You're regulating someone to invent technology But I feel like there will be a backlash When too many right now we're seeing the reason one of the reasons we're having this conversation is that conservatives feel like they're being Persecuted and repressed so then it's gonna escalate for me. It's not gonna stop with these conversations and so that we've been having a lot of talks about this particularly around algorithms and One of the things that we're really focused on is not just fairness and outcomes But also explainability of algorithms and I know Jack you you love the steps I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about our work there Yeah, I mean we so there's two fields of research within artificial intelligence that are rather new But I think really impactful for our industry one is fairness and ML so Fairness and what fairness and machine learning and deep learning so looking at everything from what data set is Fed to an algorithm so like the training data set all the way to how the algorithm actually behaves on that on that data set making sure that it it does not develop bias over the Long longevity of the algorithms use case. So that's one area that we want to lead in and we've been working with some of the leading researchers in the industry to do that because the reality is a lot of this human judgment is moving algorithms and The the second issue with it moving algorithms is algorithms today Can't necessarily explain the decision-making criteria that they use So they can't explain in the way that you make a decision you explain why you make that decision algorithms today are not being programmed in such a way that they can even explain that you may wear an Apple watch for instance, it might tell you to stand every now and then Right now those algorithms can't explain why why they're doing that right that that's a bad example because it does it every fit every 50 minutes, but as we offload more and more of these decisions both internally and also individually to Watches and into cars and whatnot there there is no there's no ability right now for That algorithm to actually go through and list out the criteria used to make that decision so this is another area that we'd like to get really good at if we want to continue to be Transparent around our actions because a lot of these things are just black boxes and they're being built in that way because there's been No research into like well, how do we get these algorithms to explain what their decision is? That question hasn't been asked my fear is you it's technology that you need to build Yeah, but the the public discourse is there we know that foreign governments are doing this We know that Democratic operatives in Alabama did this and so I imagine that You know with Donald Trump, I you know, he talked about an executive order for free speech on college campuses So that the chattering is here someone's going to take a sledgehammer to Twitter to Facebook to YouTube and just be like For not understanding the technology behind it not willing to give you the benefit But the benefit of the doubt and just saying I don't care why you're doing it You know, I mean pass some bills and and then it's over again clarifying I Think you guys are biased and I think what you're doing is dangerous But I think that doesn't matter that doesn't matter what you think is right It matters that all of these companies are doing similar things and it's and it's and it's already terrifying people I mean look when when I saw somebody got banned from their bank account That's terrifying and PayPal has done this for a long time, you know That seems like more egregious than being banned from any social justice or social media platform that that seems to me to be worthy of Boycott Patriot patreon issued a statement about a man I believe his name is Robert Spencer and they said MasterCard instructed us to ban him and you know what you know I'll say this to me mentioning chase PayPal MasterCard terrifies me I'm on the Joe Rogan podcast right now calling out these big companies in defiance and we've already I would like to know all the Specifics of why they chose to do that and I would hope that they would release some sort of a statement Explaining why they chose to do that. Maybe there's something we don't know There was there was a reporter and I could begin this wrong because I didn't follow it very much with big league politics Who said that after reporting on PayPal negatively they banned him? That's terrifying. So it's just reporting on it in what way like we're not gonna saga of a cod issue No, apparently as a journalist he wrote about something bad PayPal did big league politics is conservative And so all of a sudden he got a notification that they can't tell him why but he's gone So I see these big tech monopolies. I see YouTube Facebook Twitter I see PayPal MasterCard and they're doing it and they all say they're doing the right thing but all of these little things they're doing are adding up to something nightmarish and Some some right legislators gonna show up and in a matter of time with a sledgehammer and just he's gonna whack your algorithm