5 takeaways from POLITICO’s interview with Twitter’s CEO

Jack Dorsey is pictured.

Ahead of a marathon day of back-to-back congressional hearings Wednesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey came to POLITICO’s offices to discuss Republican allegations that his company is biased, his own role in Twitter’s content decisions and the behind-the-scenes wrangling that preceded his appearance on the Hill.

Here are our main takeaways from the conversation.

There’s a line Trump can’t cross — but it’s not clear where it is.

Is there anything that President Donald Trump could tweet that would be so abusive or violent that it would get him booted from Twitter? Dorsey said when it comes to Trump, “I do have notifications turned on for a number of accounts, including his,” but deferred on specifics to Twitter’s head of legal and policy Vijaya Gadde, who said the answer is “yes.”

While Trump’s tweets get considered under a company policy that weighs whether the behavior is “newsworthy or in the legitimate public interest,” the president could, in theory, go too far and get banned from the service, according to Gadde. But, she acknowledged that the company needs more clarity on what counts as “in the legitimate public interest.”

Dorsey denies personally calling the shots on Twitter bans.

The Twitter CEO said that while he gives input on whether users are violating the website’s rules, he doesn’t get involved in the final decisions on banning accounts.

“My role is to ask questions and make sure we’re being impartial and upholding consistently our terms of service, including [what’s in the] public interest,” he said.

He also denied a Wall Street Journal report that he overturned Twitter staff decisions and allowed far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and white supremacist Richard Spencer to remain on the service. Dorsey said he provided input on those decisions, but added, “I don’t think I’ve ever overruled” any one of them.

Any bias is unintentional and corrected, he said.

Dorsey rejected conservative complaints that Twitter is silencing their voices, saying “we write our policies and our rules and our enforcement guidelines with one single principle, which is impartiality,” and any allegations of biased decision-making are “false.”

Still, could there be unintentional bias shaping how decisions get made on Twitter? Dorsey allowed for it.

“It’s not an intentful bias that’s been injected. We are doing a lot of work to study bias within algorithms generally, and what might cause an outcome of bias towards one party or another, or one leaning or another, whether it be conservative or more liberal. That’s an active field of research. But the intention is impartiality,” he said, adding, “If we ever recognize an outcome that is not impartial, we fix it.”

Dorsey didn’t want to testify alone.

The Twitter CEO is set to testify solo before the House Energy and Commerce committee Wednesday over allegations that Twitter is biased against conservatives. But he says he didn’t want it that way.

During tense negotiations with the House panel, committee staff at one point held out the possibility of a subpoena for Dorsey. But Dorsey told POLITICO he resisted because he didn’t think it was right that Facebook and Google were given a pass.

“We’re happy to have a conversation with our peers, because we don’t think this is an issue focused on just us alone. So we were attempting to get our peers up there as well and be joined by them, rather than be singled out,” Dorsey said. “We don’t think that’s fair.”

He thinks utility-style regulation of internet companies is a bad idea.

One of the strangest twists in the Republican pressure campaign on big internet companies is that the traditionally business-friendly, anti-regulation party is floating the idea of government checks on the tech industry. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who has emerged as a vocal tech critic, has reportedly backed treating Twitter, Google and Facebook like public utilities, subject to government oversight. He recently called for the companies to be required to put their user data in some sort of public trust.

That isn’t a smart move, Dorsey argued.

“I think it comes out of the perception that Twitter is used as a public square,” he said, adding that it’s an unnecessary step “as long as we’re transparent around what’s guiding our decisions and enforcement, that we show willingness to evolve the rules as circumstances evolve.”