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The Independent
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Twitter: Breaking the Bird shows how the internet's hottest website grew into a social media skip fire
Some tweets age better than others. For example, Jack Dorsey 's tweet, posted after he'd agreed to sell his social media platform, Twitter, to Elon Musk in 2022 hasn't really stood the test of time. 'Elon is the singular solution I trust', he wrote. Musk repaid that trust by symbolically slaughtering Dorsey's little blue bird and replacing it with a literal and metaphorical iron cross. In just over two years, he's turned a flawed but fascinating experiment in human communication into a rancid cyber-sewer, littered with fascists, incels, conspiracy theorists and unblockable Temu adverts. A singular solution indeed. But how did we get here? The BBC's new documentary Twitter: Breaking the Bird attempts to answer this. It's bizarre to contemplate this now but there was a time when tech innovators weren't considered by some to be menaces to society, threats to freedom and amplifiers of evil. In fact, there was a time when they were widely viewed as exactly the opposite. Many people genuinely hoped that sites like Twitter and Facebook might represent the democratisation of discourse and even a step forward in human evolution. Initially, this documentary captures that short, heady period evocatively. Although if anything, what's really striking is how banal Twitter 1.0 was. Its users basically used it to document the minutiae of their daily lives. The site was nearly called 'Friendstalker' a name that simultaneously feels mildly creepy and a million times less sinister that what Twitter was to become. It's hard to think of a starker illustration of Marshall McLuhan's maxim about the medium becoming the message than the rapid, exponential growth of a platform people essentially used to tell their virtual friends they were nipping out to buy a coffee. In this context, the medium of this film – a long-form TV documentary consisting simply of archive film and talking heads – feels like a deliberate counterpoint, and bracingly retro. New media disrupts, it seems to imply, leaving legacy media to pick up the pieces. Along with the breezy, flashy inanity of early Twitter, the film catches something profound too. The platform's early innocuousness seems to have blinded the site's creators to the fact that they were building a timebomb. The developers (including Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman – co-founder and erstwhile CEO Dorsey does not contribute to this documentary) were too lost in the present to consider the future. Visionaries they might have been, but these were tunnel visionaries; unable to stop, look around, feel which way the wind was blowing. They did, however, have warnings. It's hard not to feel sorry for the marooned, under-resourced Del Harvey, head of trust and safety, throughout. She clearly understood from an early stage that she was little more than window dressing for the company. Early adopter Ariel Waldman was followed onto Twitter by a real-life stalker. She complained to Dorsey, who refused to take the stalker's tweets down or suspend his account. 'Good luck with resolving the problem' he concluded briskly. 'Best. Jack'. Was this the moment when freedom of speech was first jumbled up with freedom from consequences? And so it goes on. As we watch with the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to imagine how this story could have turned out any other way. Celebrities arrived, bringing parasocial intimacy with them. In 2011, the Arab Spring protests illustrated Twitter's latent activist power. The 'Gamergate' controversy in 2014 saw online misogyny start to reveal itself. Dorsey was sacked, returned, involved himself in the Black Lives Matter protests, wore a T-shirt reading 'Stay Woke', became increasingly strange and started throwing his energy into meditation sessions rather than addressing the company's problems. Covid, finally, was the tipping point; the spark that lit the skip fire. Musk is an oddly marginal presence in the film, even as he carries his famous sink into Twitter HQ. His route to radicalisation might helpfully have been explored, if only because for all of his wealth and influence, it feels so oddly familiar. He was worried about losing money during Covid. He was angry about 'wokeness'. He preferred shrill voices offering facile solutions to stolid voices offering evidence-tested ones. And he joined all of these abstract grievances together and came up with an answer reading 'Donald Trump'. It's often said that in 2020-21, we experienced parallel pandemics; one medical, one informational. X/Twitter has become the medium through which this has played out. Ultimately, this documentary tells a great 21st century cautionary tale – although whether any lessons will be learned remains to be seen. Twitter (and other similar companies) grew too fast. It became both financially and culturally dominant too quickly. The growth spurt caught governments by surprise: it was too fast for any kind of meaningful regulatory framework to keep pace. And most of all, as becomes clear in this film, the companies grew too rapidly for the people involved to handle them. They were unmanageable in purely logistical terms; because of the constant firefighting involved with basic maintenance, any moral or ethical considerations fell by the wayside. And now, it's too late. There's a sense that some of the contributors here would love to bolt the stable door. But sadly the horse is now several fields away and galloping hard. 'You can't have universal free speech' says one of the original developers Evan Henshaw-Plath. 'Because the speech of some destroys the speech of others'. If only someone had thought about that at the time…
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Twitter: Breaking the Bird review – how all the hate speech flooded in
It turns out that Mike Judge's supposed sitcom Silicon Valley was a documentary after all. My bad, as the people young and in touch enough with the world to have known this all along may still say. Twitter: Breaking the Bird is a 75-minute CNN film chronicling the rise, fall and possibly end of the social media site that was launched by a group of eager young things in 2006 amid a widespread belief – at least in the Valley – in the power of the internet to remake the world in radically better ways. This, a co-founder or two has come to consider since, may have been a 'hallucinogenically optimistic' view. Well, we were all young once. Although that feels – and in no small measure because of Twitter – like a very long time ago. The original gang comprised Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass. Dorsey, who became Twitter's first CEO, came up with the idea of letting the site enable users to update each other on their thoughts, doings and feelings in real time. 'Microblogging' is the word I remember being bandied about at the time, although it is not used here. Maybe no one knows what blogging was any more. (It was long-form Twitter. Does that help?) Twitter exploded in popularity, in part because celebrities were attracted to its immediacy and the apparent clarity of interaction it offered. Politicians flocked there, too, once its soft but extraordinary power began to become apparent, then activists, along with ever-growing numbers of ordinary users. The only problem was that the site was – please allow me to summarise some of the technical terms here – a piece of rubbish. These were the 'fail whale' years: whenever the site crashed, an apologetic message would come on screen accompanied by the image of a blue whale being lifted by many, many little Twitter birds. 'It was the loudest platform and the saddest little business,' says the tech journalist Kara Swisher. Dorsey was ousted as CEO, the rest of the co-founders were pushed or walked and a new boss, Dick Costolo, ordered a rebuild from the ground up. Five years later, he restored Dorsey – and his unwavering belief in free speech – to the throne. At first, as Twitter became instrumental in popularising theBlack Lives Matter movement, Dorsey's belief in his creation as a democratising, liberalising force seemed justified. You will never guess what, though. It didn't last. Del Harvey was the woman the boys had reluctantly appointed in the early days to deal with online abuse. She saw the pitfalls of an unthinking commitment to free speech. As Twitter's former engineering manager Leslie Miley puts it: 'It's not just a naive philosophy; it's a privileged philosophy.' Harvey had argued from the beginning for various tools and protections, but – I hope you are sitting down – wasn't taken seriously. Hate speech of all kinds, especially misogynistic, flooded in. Then, in 2016, Trump arrived. He commanded attention and drove engagement, but his vitriolic posts legitimised others. Debate raged. Should he be banned? Should other users be banned? Should more posts be taken down? Does free speech mean freedom from consequences? Dorsey preferred to, as Swisher puts it, 'go stare at a finch in Sri Lanka' than evolve a more sophisticated policy. Mounting issues meant 'Twitter stopped being fun' for Dorsey, according to one of his team. He resigned as CEO and sold the company to Elon Musk – 'the singular solution I trust', apparently because of the billionaire's commitment to unfettered freedom of speech. X, as Musk rebranded the site, is now a hellscape. Twitter: Breaking the Bird is a compelling tale – albeit told without flair – of how idealism and ignorance, willed and unwilled, combined to bring down a potential empire. It is an illustration of the profound difficulties we will face if we continue to let young, confident, unformed and uninformed men shape and rule the internet – which is to say our society – without making them look at what they are doing and examine the consequences. Although it isn't asked explicitly, one question underlies every scene: has the internet made us monstrous, or given free rein to what was always there? Put another way, when we look at the hellscape, are we looking at the worst of humanity – a self-selecting group of horrors, unrepresentative of the whole – or the essence of it? Answers come there none. I may just look at a finch in Sri Lanka for a while. Twitter: Breaking the Bird aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Gamergate foreshadowed the toxic hellscape that the internet has now become
A new CNN series 'Twitter: Breaking the Bird' follows the insider story behind the meteoric rise and eventual sale of the revolutionary app featuring the voices of the founders themselves. The four-part series airs on Sundays at 10pm ET/PT. It's not uncommon these days to hear the internet described as a hellscape. Hate speech proliferates in online spaces. Algorithms designed to maximize user engagement amplify divisive content that inevitably leaves us outraged. Disinformation and misinformation spread on social media at rates seemingly impossible to contain. If that weren't enough, bad-faith actors exploit these dynamics, distorting reality for part of the population and deepening political divides. People who were paying close attention to certain corners of the internet saw this reality coming more than a decade ago in Gamergate, in which an angry online mob waged a virulent harassment campaign against women and diversity in the video game industry. Gamergate was one of the earliest indications that what happened online could have major implications offline — and that a few people who understood the mechanics of the internet could manipulate it to advance a nefarious agenda. Those who experienced the harassment firsthand warned that if not taken seriously, the behaviors underlying Gamergate would fester. In the years since, as some experts and observers see it, social media platforms on which Gamergate transpired failed to adequately combat toxic content and online abuse, while lawmakers, traditional media outlets and much of the public failed to see its relevance beyond the world of video games. From flooding the zone to the use of memes, the tactics once employed by a niche community of gamers are all too familiar today — they've since developed into a political strategy that's routinely used in the halls of power. To use a popular internet shorthand, 'everything is Gamergate.' On August 16, 2014, a 24-year-old male programmer posted a more than 9,000-word tirade about the dissolution of his relationship with video game developer Zoë Quinn. The rambling account contained screenshots of their private correspondences and accused Quinn, among several allegations, of sleeping with a journalist for the gaming site Kotaku in exchange for a positive review. 'There was no proof of this supposed illegitimately obtained review, just repetition of the Manifesto's accusations mixed with such conspiratorial conjecture that it would make someone wearing a tinfoil hat instantly sprout another, tinier tinfoil hat on top of it,' Quinn wrote in 'Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life.' In reality, the reporter never even reviewed the game, and Kotaku said at the time that its leadership team found 'no compelling evidence' that the writer had traded favorable coverage for sex. But the ex-boyfriend's rant quickly attracted the attention of online forum 4chan users, who seized on the alleged relationship between Quinn and the Kotaku writer. The events mutated into a leaderless harassment campaign known as Gamergate, eventually moving from 4chan to more mainstream social media platforms. Anonymous gamers made rape and death threats against Quinn, feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, game developer Brianna Wu and others who advocated for a more inclusive gaming industry, and released private information about them. The campaign's participants also pressured companies to stop advertising on gaming sites that they viewed as critical of gamer culture. Gamergate activists claimed they were concerned about ethics in games journalism. But really they seemed to be responding to a perceived loss of status, said Adrienne Massanari, a scholar who researches digital culture and author of 'Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right.' For a long time, video games were seen as the domain of young White men. When that was challenged, whether by a game developer subverting industry norms or a woman calling out stereotypical female characters, a core contingent of gamers saw it as political correctness run amok, Massanari wrote in her book. And that sentiment soon expanded beyond video games. 'There was a story on offer pretty quickly after Gamergate started gaining traction that it wasn't just about games,' she told CNN. 'It wasn't just that you were no longer the center of a pop culture universe. You're no longer the center of political life.' Gamergate wasn't the first instance of harassment in gaming communities, but it was the first time it reached that scale, Massanari wrote in her book. What was notable about Gamergate, she told CNN, was the internet savvy of its participants, who manipulated social media to perpetuate abuse and promote their cause. Put simply, they gamed the system. On Twitter, for instance, Gamergaters flooded the mentions of particular users as a form of harassment. They also used Twitter's hashtag and retweet functions to control public narrative. By generating a volume of activity on the platform, they could make it seem like a particular message was trending, even if only a small group of users was behind the posts. One notable example was #NotYourShield, which purportedly represented women and minority supporters of Gamergate who were tired of feminist activists claiming to speak on their behalf. Chat logs later revealed that #NotYourShield was not an organic social media trend or movement but rather a campaign orchestrated by a small number of 4chan users using false online identities, seemingly in an attempt to defend Gamergate against criticisms of racism and misogyny. While much of the harassment and public campaign happened on mainstream social media such as Twitter and Reddit, Massanari said Gamergate was coordinated on more niche platforms — an organizing strategy that, up until then, had been applied primarily by pro-democracy, social justice activists. 'Gamergate was that moment when people started realizing that you weren't going to necessarily see activism always be this net positive thing,' Massanari added. The extent of harassment and abuse that Gamergate's victims experienced — forcing some to leave their homes and go into hiding — showed just how badly tech companies had failed to protect their users, Massanari and others said. As some in the tech industry see it, Gamergate activists were able to weaponize social media precisely because of how those platforms were designed. The problems, in other words, weren't a bug but a feature. Silicon Valley leaders, committed to upholding free speech, were overly permissive in their approach to online content, said Jason Goldman, who served as Twitter's first vice president of product and later as chief digital officer in the Obama White House. And because they were mostly White men who didn't experience the online harassment that women and minorities did, Goldman said they were naive about the possibility that their platforms could cause harm. 'There weren't enough people around who personally had skin in the game,' he said. Leslie Miley, an engineer who worked at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, said he and others in the company started to recognize how the platform was being misused, but Twitter lacked the robust infrastructure needed to effectively combat the toxic behavior. 'We're playing a global game of Whac-a-Mole, and we need an army of octopus to do it,' he said. 'And guess what? We don't have an army of octopus.' In response to those challenges, Twitter built out teams on user services and trust and safety, as well as an extensive policy framework around content moderation. But executives were also reluctant to take bold actions — such as banning certain accounts or shutting down some discussions — that might reduce Twitter's user base and therefore negatively affect the business, according to Miley. 'They were allowed to organize, they were allowed to spread, and they were allowed to create content much longer than they should have,' he said, referring to Gamergate activists. Faced with mounting pressure, Twitter later instituted more aggressive policies that permanently banned accounts for repeated violations of its rules. (Such accounts were restored en masse during Elon Musk's takeover of the platform, which is now known as X. After advertisers and critics expressed concerns, however, X reported last fall that it was continuing to police harmful content, including suspended accounts and removing and labeling posts that violated its rules. CNN has reached out to X for comment.) Reddit, Massanari wrote in her book, became less willing to tolerate far-right speech over the years. The company went on to ban more than 2,000 subreddits that it said promoted hate based on identity or vulnerability, among other changes to its content policy. Recently, the platform also announced it would begin warning users who upvote violating content. A Reddit spokesperson told CNN that current company policy prohibits hateful and violent content on the platform. But social media companies still struggle to balance the need to police abuse on their platforms, their foundational values of giving everyone a voice and the risk of alienating some users, Massanari said. In some instances, content policy changes have been met with outrage and backlash from users who had grown accustomed to digital spaces with few restrictions. 'If you imagine this big aircraft carrier that's turning, it's very hard once all those norms have been set up to start incrementally trying to reshape that space,' she said. Gamergate's impact went beyond the gaming universe. It mobilized a new generation of disaffected, young men into becoming politically active, Massanari wrote in her book. The movement found sympathetic allies in far-right media figures and internet personalities, many of whom built their names by championing the Gamergate cause, per Massanari. Pro-Gamergate influencers, in turn, exposed their followers to other political ideas, including a broad suspicion about contemporary institutions that they viewed as too beholden to identity politics and political correctness, she wrote. Political strategist Steve Bannon understood the power of this dynamic acutely. 'You can activate that army,' Bannon told Bloomberg reporter Joshua Green in 2017. 'They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.' But as Charlie Warzel put it in a 2019 piece for The New York Times Opinion, Gamergate's 'most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war.' Gamergate gave rise to a pattern of sowing confusion and chaos in the information landscape, Massasnari said. Participants elevated new conspiracies and used memes and ironic rhetoric to send coded signals, allowing them to claim plausible deniability about troubling aspects of the movement. Traditional newsrooms struggled to cover these communities and forces responsibly, giving equal weight to 'both sides' even if one side wasn't arguing or acting in good faith, according to a report from Whitney Phillips, a scholar and author of 'This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.' In some cases, they inadvertently amplified extremist ideology. In an eerily prescient article for Deadspin in 2014, Kyle Wagner predicted that this pattern would become the future of political and cultural battles. 'What we have in Gamergate is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center,' he wrote at the time. 'What we're seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved.' Over the years, the Gamergate playbook would be replicated in conspiracies such as Pizzagate and QAnon, as well as the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The legacies of Gamergate are complicated and far-reaching. In one sense, per some scholars, Gamergate was a battle between an increasingly diverse society and a group of White men who felt threatened over those societal shifts. At least within the realm of video games, Gamergate supporters seem to be losing: The gaming industry workforce is significantly more diverse than the US workforce more broadly, and studios and developers are adopting more inclusive storylines and characters. Still, the backlash against diversity persists — in video games and on a much grander scale, in President Donald Trump's elimination of federal DEI programs. Meanwhile, Gamergate did force more people in the tech industry to reckon with abuse and harassment. And while major companies have rolled back some efforts to curb harmful content on their platforms, others in the tech sector are building new social technologies with the lessons of Gamergate in mind, said Evan 'Rabble' Henshaw-Plath, a member of Twitter's founding team. For Henshaw-Plath, the enduring lesson of Gamergate was that social media platforms as they were originally envisioned were only as good as the people using them. 'What happened with Gamergate is inherent to what happens when you take human nature and you give them a tool that potentially puts the entirety of humanity in the same conversation,' they said. 'All of humanity's problems, dynamics and difficulties can get amplified if we design a system that doesn't account for them.' But that doesn't mean a toxic internet is inevitable, said Henshaw-Plath and others. Regulators can implement rules to improve content moderation and mandate transparency by social media platforms. Tech companies can diversify their top ranks to help ensure their platforms are designed to be safe for everyone. And people in the industry can create new systems that put more power in the hands of users — like what X competitors Bluesky and Mastodon are doing. For many users, social media platforms were once an exciting, and even transformative, space for community. With some radical reimagining, Henshaw-Plath said, they might experience that feeling again.
BBC News
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Twitter: Breaking the Bird reveals the insider story of the social media site in new documentary for BBC iPlayer and BBC Two
A new documentary for BBC Two and iPlayer will go inside the creation of a once-radical, groundbreaking tech startup in Twitter: Breaking the Bird. From Candle True Stories and Bitachon365 in association with CNN Original Series, the 75-minute documentary follows the insider story behind the meteoric rise and eventual sale of the revolutionary app featuring the voices of the founders themselves. Twitter: Breaking the Bird will premiere on BBC Two and iPlayer on 31 March. In 2006, a group of tech entrepreneurs created the earth-shattering social media app, Twitter. In just a few years it transformed the way the world communicated. Twitter was adopted by celebrities, politicians and the everyday masses as a source for news, entertainment and community. Through firsthand accounts from some of its original founders and early employees, this is the inside story of Twitter's inception, explosive growth across the world, and the dark underbelly of online hate and harassment that emerged. Twitter: Breaking the Bird features new interviews with co-founder and former CEO Ev Williams and co-founder Biz Stone, who share their personal experiences of how a group of idealistic friends set out to build a digital utopia, and how that vision morphed into the platform now owned by Elon Musk. Featuring additional insight from numerous Twitter employees from the rank and file to the C-suite, and analysis from journalists like Kara Swisher who have been covering the company since day one, Twitter: Breaking the Bird is the definitive tale of the corporate clashes and revolving door leadership behind the scenes at this once trailblazing company. 'It's thrilling to hear from the original creators of Twitter about their joyous, and sometimes chaotic, early days setting up the world's most disruptive tech platform; and shocking to see how their decisions over two decades shaped today's social media conversation,' said Tom Coveney, Commissioning Editor for the BBC. 'This is an entertaining and highly informative film that we hope will delight BBC viewers and stimulate debate across the UK.' 'Candle True Stories is proud to bring viewers an unprecedented look at the rise and evolution of Twitter,' said James Goldston, President and founder of Candle True Stories. 'While capturing the creativity, chaos, and conflicts that shaped the world's digital town square, this series challenges us to confront one of the most pressing questions of our time: Is there such a thing as too much free speech?' 'Twitter's story is one of both boundless innovation and cautionary lessons,' said Sheldon Lazarus, Executive Producer at Bitachon365. 'Through this series, we reveal the human ambition, conflict, and resilience behind the social media giant that shaped global conversations in ways no one could have imagined. At Bitachon365, we're proud to bring audiences a definitive and deeply personal look at the birth, rise, and reinvention of a tech phenomenon." Twitter: Breaking the Bird was commissioned for BBC Two and iPlayer by Jack Bootle, BBC Head of Commissioning, Specialist Factual. It is executive produced by James Goldston and Ricardo Pollack for Candle True Stories, Sheldon Lazarus for Bitachon365, and Amy Entelis and Lyle Gamm for CNN Original Series. Fred Hepburn is co- executive producer and the series director is Kate Quine. Tom Coveney is the Commissioning Editor for the BBC. Twitter: Breaking the Bird will premiere on BBC Two and iPlayer on 31 March. Watch Twitter: Breaking the Bird on BBC iPlayer from Monday 31 March candle@
Egypt Independent
17-03-2025
- Business
- Egypt Independent
They helped start Twitter. They didn't realize what it would become
A new CNN series 'Twitter: Breaking the Bird' follows the insider story behind the meteoric rise and eventual sale of the revolutionary app featuring the voices of the founders themselves. The four-part series airs on Sundays at 10pm ET/PT from March 9th – 30th. New York CNN — Tech founders don't always know what their products will become or how people will eventually use them. That's what happened with Twitter, early employees of the company told CNN in a new documentary series called 'Twitter: Breaking the Bird.' The original version of Twitter reflected the early internet of the time — and the radical, optimistic vision for what its founders believed the online world could be. But over the subsequent two decades Twitter had to grapple with what it truly meant to give anyone a voice on the internet, including those who would use that voice to spread hate speech or seek power in ways the founders never saw coming. 'There was a lot going on. There's not really time in the day to contemplate the much larger implications of what we're building,' Twitter founder Evan Williams said in the series, reflecting on Twitter's early days. Of course, the world now knows what Twitter has become. The company, now called X, is owned by Elon Musk; the world's richest man has used it to help reelect President Donald Trump and continues to use it to push his own political and social agenda as he seeks to reshape the US government. White supremacists and disinformation peddlers have been welcomed back to the platform, even as some longtime users try to cling to its utility for sharing real-time news and information. And while Twitter long struggled to turn its influence into a profitable business, the company's value is more questionable now than ever after Musk's controversial policies alienated advertisers. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discussed the company's chaotic early days in the new CNN documentary series 'Twitter: Breaking the Bird.' CNN The 'Breaking the Bird' series pulls back the curtain on how the company got here. It chronicles Twitter's history — from its creation by a group of counter-culture founders and its chaotic leadership struggles to presidents and political candidates learning how to tweet and, ultimately, to Musk's dramatic $44 billion takeover. 'We built this thing that took on a life of its own that has these bad elements and these good elements and the battle is trying to have the good outweigh the bad,' Williams said in a later episode. 'And that's what felt like a maybe losing battle over time. Like, is it worth it? Is this whole idea flawed?' X did not respond to a request for comment. 'The fog of uncertainty' In many ways, the world — online and offline — has changed in ways no one could have predicted when Twitter was founded in 2006. At the time, Facebook had only just been released to the public, and weblogs were all the rage. Mobile apps didn't even exist yet, as the iPhone wouldn't launch for another year. When Twitter launched, much of its content was relatively unserious. In its first year, co-founder Jack Dorsey posted things like 'walk home. Cold'; Stone posted 'eating a baked potato and green beans with bbq seitan and white wine.' 'I think you have a notion of what you're doing, you have a hunch, but the fog of uncertainty is pretty dense,' Jason Goldman, Twitter's first head of product, who later served as chief digital officer in the Obama White House, said in an interview ahead of the series' release. 'That's why there's this natural sort of bias towards action in the tech industry, which is like, let's move forward. Let's try to do something, and we'll launch that, and we'll see what people do with it.' As Twitter grew, people used it in positive ways its founders hadn't expected, too, including to organize social movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter. At the center of Twitter's story is Dorsey, the billionaire who is widely viewed as the father of the platform. His values and code are written into Twitter's foundation; he ran the company for a combined eight years (from 2006 to 2008 , and again from 2015 to 2021) and may have ultimately helped tee up Musk's acquisition. Two of the creators of Twitter, Evan Williams (L) and Jack Dorsey (R), in San Francisco on March 15, 2007. Christina Koci Hernandez/SanDorsey always envisioned Twitter as being a place to promote free expression. 'A platform, in order to be a platform, has to be free … I think we need to hear every extreme,' he said in a 2016 interview at the Code conference. But that also meant he was sometimes slow to tackle the platform's issues. Del Harvey, the company's longtime former head of trust and safety, said in the series that Twitter hadn't 'invest(ed) a lot in' those areas as of 2017, when the social media site faced mounting pressure to address the spread of hate and abuse In 2020, Dorsey invited Musk to call into a company-wide meeting. 'By the way, do you want to run Twitter?' he asked the billionaire Tesla CEO and Twitter superuser, along with a question about how he would fix the social media platform. Musk responded that staff should address 'people trying to manipulate the system … they're trying to sway public opinion and sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what's real public opinion and what's not.' It was just two years later that Musk would begin taking a financial stake in Twitter that would set the stage for his acquisition. Looking back, there's more Twitter's early team could have done to uphold its original vision, Goldman said. However, he said, Twitter's fate may have been unavoidable. 'Our intent was that it would be used for these delightful use cases … and that we would treat the things that we didn't like as essentially bugs of the system,' Goldman said. 'But the reality is that some of those things, those use cases — such as becoming a dominant propaganda tool for a rising right-wing, authoritarian ideology, both domestically and around the world — that is not a bug, that is a feature of the tool.'
