There are only three truly censorship resistant technologies at scale today: tor, bitcoin, and nostr.
All are currently niche…showing most of the world doesn’t actually care about censorship.
Granted, these technologies aren’t yet accessible or easy to use. But…they will be!
I’m moving $1B of my Square equity (~28% of my wealth) to
#startsmall
LLC to fund global COVID-19 relief. After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education, and UBI. It will operate transparently, all flows tracked here:
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵
Twitter Pulls Trump Campaign Video of President Showing Empathy For Peaceful Protesters They are fighting hard for the Radical Left Democrats. A one sided battle. Illegal. Section 230!
Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me. Please leave our employees out of this. We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make.
Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient. They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment. I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.
I’m really happy Elon is joining the Twitter board! He cares deeply about our world and Twitter’s role in it.
Parag and Elon both lead with their hearts, and they will be an incredible team.
I’m excited to share that we’re appointing
@elonmusk
to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board.
I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban
@realDonaldTrump
from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
the days of usenet, irc, the web...even email (w PGP)...were amazing. centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.
I realize I'm partially to blame, and regret it.
In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.
Square is considering making a hardware wallet for
#bitcoin
. If we do it, we would build it entirely in the open, from software to hardware design, and in collaboration with the community. We want to kick off this thinking the right way: by sharing some of our guiding principles.
A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.
Life in Beijing: relentless covid testing & health app that dictates where I go
Green code is needed to enter public areas. Red means quarantine/isolation.
Authorities track people's movements thru these apps. Concern is this surveillance will stay long after covid is gone
@cnn
Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense. It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will.
Every administration, republican or democrat, has an opportunity to build trust with the public.
Instead, every single time, they choose deception and zero accountability. It’s not the party, it’s the system.
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵
@elonmusk
If the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves? Including all discussions around current and future actions? Make everything public now.
#TwitterFiles
"The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq... I mean of Ukraine"
Former US President George W Bush slips up and condemns Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of "Iraq"
Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” is the right one. This is also
@paraga
’s goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path...I believe it with all my heart.
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
This does not make us an “arbiter of truth.” Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.
We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.
For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! 😉”
You don’t own “web3.”
The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.
Know what you’re getting into…
The energy in Nigeria 🇳🇬 will transform the world. The youth have already begun building a pan African financial settlement layer using
#bitcoin
and nothing can stop peer to peer. Africa is now leading the new world of finance and crypto adoption. Let us all show them love 💗
Square is considering building a Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide. If we do this, we’d follow our hardware wallet model: build in the open in collaboration with the community. First some thoughts and questions.
I have tried taking a break from Twitter recently, but I must say: the company has always tried to do its best given the information it had. Every decision we made was ultimately my responsibility*. In the cases we were wrong or went too far, we admitted it and worked to correct.
While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
An Open Letter To The Nigerian Government: Pursue A
#Bitcoin
Standard.
"A delay in pursuing a national plan for bitcoin adoption will risk a scenario where Nigeria is left behind."
Written by
@RussellOkung
.
Per our Civic Integrity policy (), the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots). We’re updating the link on
@realDonaldTrump
’s tweet to make this more clear.
Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is
#Bitcoin
. Its name is TBD.
The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.
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To help promote informed discussion, we're testing a new prompt on Android –– when you Retweet an article that you haven't opened on Twitter, we may ask if you'd like to open it first.
Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.
deleted my instagram account after 12 years. was one of the first 10 accounts I believe, and one of the first angel investors.
who will they give the
@jack
handle to?