At least it’s not the Facebook dumpster fire

Eons ago, in 2010, a hugely successful movie about Mark Zuckerberg co-founding Facebook hit theaters. At the same time, a parody version of the Social Network trailer was a hit on YouTube. The parody imagined how dumb the picture would be if it was about Twitter instead, a relatively tiny and floundering company that Zuckerberg was then referring to as a “clown car.” Surely a Twitter movie would be little more than celebrities tweeting about their breakfast while some founder guy — then not even famous enough to be named — roamed the halls screaming “hashtags!”?

But by the time Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO of Twitter in November 2021, it was clear that he, not Zuckerberg, was the owner of the most dramatic narrative arc in social media history. A shy programmer and would-be fashion designer, ousted by Ev Williams in a boardroom coup in 2008, Dorsey reinvented himself as the spiritual heir to Steve Jobs. He crafted a fawning media image and clawed his way back to the top job over six years, via a slo-mo boardroom coup of his own.

That in itself is enough raw material for a blockbuster, but what happened next would make for one of those rare sequels that is more engrossing than the original. For the era of the Twitter troll had begun, and Dorsey was utterly unprepared to deal with it. He barely grasped that the targeted harassment of Gamergate was driving some of his most loyal users off the platform when the biggest troll of all used the service to help get himself elected president. Suddenly Twitter found itself at the center of the world in the worst way possible, the source of existential threats to the planet in general and American democracy in particular.

A movie protagonist is most compelling when he grows, learns, and changes. That is precisely what Dorsey has done in recent years, and what Zuckerberg has not done. With total control over his company, and a disturbing level of faith in his algorithm, Zuck keeps missing threats and blundering into clueless decisions. Result: Facebook is a four-alarm trash fire, now facing a well-armed whistleblower and bipartisan consensus that it needs to be regulated. Dorsey’s belated changes haven’t fixed everything, but he has at least left his successor with a smaller conflagration — a manageable, almost cute dumpster fire by comparison. Yes, the Twitterati joked about Dorsey having ascended from a service still known to many of its users as “this hell site.” But Google data tells us that “delete Facebook” is still a far-more searched term than “delete Twitter” these days, even allowing for the different sizes of the services. In a world increasingly angry at social media, that’s a win for Dorsey.

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The decision to suspend Donald Trump’s account the day of the Capitol insurrection, and more importantly to ban it permanently two days later, was initially made by one of Dorsey’s deputies — but crucially, the CEO stuck by them. This counts as bravery next to Zuck’s approach, which was to suspend Trump pending a decision of Facebook’s independent oversight board (the board, rightly, kicked the decision back to Zuck). But it was also in line with Dorsey’s decisions to ban all political ads on Twitter — a sharp contrast with Facebook, which still allows political ads even when filled with outright lies — and to cover Trump tweets that hinted at violence with warning labels.

After January 6, Facebook took a half-hearted stab at rooting out private groups where the insurrection had been planned and dangerous conspiracy theories festered. Dorsey, meanwhile, nuked 70,000 QAnon-linked Twitter accounts in a single day.

Both social services are frequent targets of bad-faith attacks from GOP acolytes looking to play the ref by complaining of supposed left-wing bias. It happened again Monday when incoming CEO Parag Agrawal was attacked for a 10-year-old tweet quoting The Daily Show on white supremacists. When Zuckerberg found himself under attack, Facebook immediately dropped its trending topics and tweaked its algorithm to the point that the top 10 most engaged-with posts on the service every day are from conservative media sources. (When researchers pointed this out, Facebook responded by cutting off their access to internal information.)

Dorsey, to his credit, never bowed to this kind of pressure. Quietly, over the past year, he has seen off threats from a prominent Republican billionaire donor who was buying up Twitter shares with the aim of ousting the CEO. Dorsey placated him with new sources of revenue, no political realignment required, and the threat of takeover has since receded. He’s also been subtly redefining Twitter as a more fun, more reliable alternative to big scary Facebook: Dorsey had fun with his tweets while Zuck sweatily testified before Congress. Twitter’s sly “hello literally everyone” tweet on the day Facebook went down this October is now one of the most-liked tweets in history.

Dorsey’s tenure may have begun with chaos and cluelessness, but it ended with many decisions that other tech leaders would do well to replicate.

We certainly shouldn’t fall into the classic trap of grading Dorsey, a rich white male, on a curve. Back when users were begging for the ability to report abusive and dangerous tweets so often that “just ban the Nazis, Jack” became a Twitter meme, Dorsey seemed the epitome of tech CEO obliviousness. He wrote a long thread about his meditation retreat in Myanmar (for which he later apologized), went on disturbingly long fasts, and seemed hung up on the notion that all Twitter needed to do in a moment of moral crisis was to make sure we all follow users outside our political bubbles. Naturally, peace and love would ensue.

But a flawed protagonist can still be a hero if they make the right choices eventually. Dorsey’s tenure may have begun with chaos and cluelessness, but it ended with many decisions that other tech leaders would do well to replicate. Early in the pandemic, Twitter was one of the first companies to announce that all its employees would have the option of working at home permanently. Dorsey also devoted nearly a third of his fortune to COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

Now Dorsey has ceded the stage to Agrawal and gone off to focus on his other company, Square, and his beloved cryptocurrency world, at just the right time. Which is to say, at a moment when we’re not heartily sick of him. If Mark Zuckerberg ever wants to appear to be a movie-worthy protagonist again, rather than a soulless blundering android, he would do well to follow the lead of the shy programmer who grew up.