Jack Dorsey reportedly overruled staff on decision to ban Alex Jones

Mike
Blake/Reuters

• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has personally made decisions
  about whether some high-profile Twitter accounts were booted or
  not from the social network, according to a story in the Wall
  Street Journal. 
• Dorsey has at times overruled his subordinates, and it
  was he who decided to keep Alex Jones, the controversial
  conservative pundit on the platform last month after staff had
  decided to ban him, the newspaper reported.
• Twitter spokespeople called claims that Dorsey ever
  overruled staff or unilaterally made decisions on these matters
  “totally false.”   

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey overruled a decision made by his staff
last month to ban conservative pundit Alex Jones from the social
network,
the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.   

Dorsey has made unilateral decisions on whether accounts
belonging to other high-profile people accused of violating
Twitter’s terms of service remained on the site or were banned,
according to the Journal’s story.

Among them were alt-right leader Richard Spencer. The Journal
reported that Spencer was accused by Twitter’s trust-and-safety
team of operating too many accounts and wanted him kicked off,
but Dorsey decided that though his accounts would be reduced to
one, he would remain on the site.  

The claims made in the Journal’s story are “totally false,”
according to a statement issued by Twitter spokespeople to the
Journal.

On Wednesday, representatives from Facebook and Twitter,
including Dorsey, are expected to appear first before the
Senate Intelligence Committee and later the House
Commerce Committee. Lawmakers will almost certainly ask how
decisions are made at the social networks concerning which kind
of content is banned and why.

Political conservatives have accused the social networks of
trying to silence right-wing voices and favoring those on the
left. President Donald Trump made similar claims the past week by
accusing Google of rigging search results to lower content from
conservatives down in the search rankings and give preferential
treatment to stories in the press that cast his administration in
a negative light.

Little evidence supporting these claims about Google and
the other social networks has been presented but during the
hearings later this week lawmakers will no doubt try to get
answers to some of these questions.