Jack Dorsey is discussed across these excerpts as the public face of Twitter during a period when the platform’s content policies, its transparency practices and its relationship to government were all contested. He is never a guest on the episodes represented here; he is named by Bill Ottman, Bob Zadek and Robert Mahoney as a party to disputes over censorship and antitrust.
Ottman on Twitter’s policies and Dorsey’s posture
In the April 2019 episode on social media censorship, Bill Ottman responded to a caller’s question about whether Twitter was any better than Facebook. Ottman said it was not much better: Twitter’s code is closed-source, so there is no access to the algorithms; the platform seemed to him involved in surveillance as well; and its content policy is inconsistent, with people being banned “all over the place.” The only credit he extended to Dorsey was that Dorsey seemed to be having deeper conversations about these issues and seemed like a generally thoughtful person. Ottman allowed that it might be possible Dorsey did not even have the power to implement radical changes in Twitter’s policy and transparency, but he concluded that censorship, surveillance and lack of transparency existed on Twitter too, and that he tried not to use it Social Media Censorship (2019).
In the same episode’s earlier segment, Ottman described Twitter’s trajectory in content policy. He said Twitter was more open in terms of content policy than Facebook but had been getting much worse over the years, and that its slogan used to be “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” He said he had come across marketing materials of Twitter’s from ten years earlier in which the company bragged that it hardly moderated content. He described the platform as having been dragged into a new policy relating to advertisers and political interests, and characterized its policy as political, because what counts as hate speech to one person does not to another. Ottman then cited the Joe Rogan interview with Tim Pool and Jack Dorsey, saying Tim Pool pointed out that it is against Twitter’s policy to misgender somebody and that people have been banned for saying a man is not a woman on Twitter. Ottman framed this as part of political polarization and identity politics, and said he did not know how Twitter could last doing this because it is so inconsistent Social Media Censorship (2019).
The New York Post episode and the antitrust framing
The November 2020 episode on trustbusting big tech opens with Bob Zadek recalling a flap between Jack Dorsey and Ted Cruz, the Republican administration and Twitter over Twitter’s blocking of the New York Post’s attempt to post information about Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter. Zadek says the word “censorship” was bandied about, and that Ted Cruz dragged Jack Dorsey before Congress and gave him a tongue-lashing and a scolding that got a lot of publicity. Zadek poses the question of who the listener is rooting for — Ted Cruz or the federal government on one hand, Twitter on the other — and calls such questions nonpartisan Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020).
Later in the same episode, Zadek recounts the sequence in more detail: the New York Post released a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop left at a pawn shop, the material found its way to Rudy Giuliani and to DOJ, and the New York Post released the information on its Twitter feed. Twitter then blocked it, Zadek says, trumping up a story that it was hacked material and violated their policy; Twitter later apologized. Zadek says this caused Jack Dorsey and others to be dragged before Congress, and that Ted Cruz publicly scolded Dorsey and complained about Dorsey’s power, asking, “Who elected you, Mr. Dorsey?” — to which, Zadek says, Dorsey didn’t have a really good answer because the answer is nobody. Zadek asks Ryan Young to explain the misuse of the word and concept of antitrust in the Twitter case and the free speech issues alleged to be involved Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020).
Young’s reply begins with what he calls the raw politics: he finds it almost unbelievable how short-sighted Republicans are being, arguing that if tech companies do have in-house bias and use their product to mute conservative thought, Republicans are nonetheless proposing to gear up a large antitrust and speech regulation machine and hand the keys to Democrats, who will use the power against Republicans. Zadek adds a parallel from Senate practice, saying it did not work when Harry Reid took a short-term approach as majority leader and compromised norms dealing with the sixty-vote supermajority required to ratify the appointment of federal judges, which Zadek says came back to haunt him and produced Amy Coney Barrett and perhaps Kavanaugh. Young agrees and calls it a thoroughly bipartisan issue, stating as a cardinal rule of politics that one should never give oneself powers one would not want the other side to have Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020).
The Twitter Files and the state-action question
In the January 2023 LifeLine episode guest-hosted by Bob Zadek, with Robert Mahoney as guest, Zadek raises what he calls a wonderful hard legal and constitutional question: when does the Constitution start to have something to say about the behavior of a private company? He asks whether there is a point at which a private company becomes enough like government that it is government, and says that if Twitter crossed that line and behaved more like government or did the government’s bidding, then it is not a big jump to say it is government, so that the First Amendment applies and Twitter has as little right to censor as does the government. Zadek describes Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files as exposing Twitter’s behavior, and says the excerpts show Twitter had intense, intimate contacts with the federal government, which had a substantial degree of control over what Twitter allowed to be published, circulated and promoted, and what it suppressed [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]].
Mahoney responds by noting that he and his fellow author Joel Simon did their research for The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free when Twitter was a different company under the ownership of Jack Dorsey, and that it had nothing to do with Elon Musk; he says everything Zadek had been saying about the revelations of the previous week in the Twitter Files is new and was not part of what they were looking at in 2020. Mahoney says the book looks at social media across platforms and countries rather than singling out Twitter, and describes how algorithms promote content that keeps users in front of the screen — “enragement is engagement” — a mechanism used by governments, private individuals and news organizations alike. On the specific question of government direction, Mahoney says that from what he has seen of the revelations Musk has been putting out, he does not think the federal government was telling Twitter what to do, but that Twitter was acting under public pressure to edit certain content, particularly tweets from political leaders including Donald Trump about COVID treatments such as anti-malarials and hydroxychloroquine, which were at first promoted and then de-amplified [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]].
Across episodes: the private-power question
The same underlying question — whether a private platform’s moderation can be treated as censorship, and whether antitrust or constitutional law reaches it — runs through the 2019, 2020 and 2023 episodes, but the excerpts show no development from one to the next. In 2019 Ottman treats Twitter’s moderation as a matter of inconsistent private policy and gives Dorsey limited personal credit; in 2020 Zadek and Young treat the Dorsey–Cruz confrontation as an occasion to warn against antitrust and speech regulation as political weapons; in 2023 Zadek reframes the same conduct as a possible state-action problem, while Mahoney cautions that the Twitter Files revelations postdate his book’s research and that he does not think the federal government was telling Twitter what to do. Each speaker advances the argument from a different premise rather than building on the earlier ones.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Dorsey’s role at Twitter in any formal sense, his tenure, his departure, or his other business interests. They do not state what any court held about Twitter’s moderation, whether any antitrust action against Twitter was filed, or how the New York Post dispute was resolved beyond Twitter’s apology as recounted by Zadek. Dorsey’s own words appear only inside others’ accounts — the Joe Rogan interview as described by Ottman, and the Cruz exchange as described by Zadek — and the excerpts contain no statement by Dorsey himself.