Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said that President Trump’s tweets are “important” and don’t violate the platform’s harassment policy that’s part of the User Agreement attached to its Terms of Service (ToS). In a recently released excerpt from an interview that TODAY will air on Sunday, Dorsey stated that the kind of discussions that are prompted by Trump’s often polarizing tweets wouldn’t be part of the public discourse without Twitter and would simply transition to a more private realm otherwise. The company’s top executive is hoping that scenario will never happen as not being able to hear from the U.S. administration directly would also impede one’s ability to hold them accountable, he argues.
Dorsey’s critics were previously skeptical about his motivations for defending President Trump’s tweets, many of which have caused controversy in the past, accusing the San Francisco-based social media giant of not enforcing its own platform policies that Trump allegedly violated on a number of occasions with the goal of maintaining and raising the popularity of its platform. However, some of Dorsey’s previous comments on the matter implied that the firm’s top executive has mixed feelings on the 45th President of the United States and his Twitter activity as he seemingly doesn’t agree with many stances Trump expressed on Twitter, though his online presence certainly has a positive impact on Twitter’s business.
While President Trump frequently uses Twitter, the current U.S. administration seemingly isn’t on exclusively good terms with the social platform that recently filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for its attempts to pressure the company into yielding identifiable information on a dissident Twitter account that was extremely critical of the government. The DHS dropped its request following the lawsuit which prompted Twitter to give up on its litigation attempt, but the case suggested that Twitter isn’t enjoying preferential treatment from the U.S. administration just because the current President happens to favor its social platform. The full context of Dorsey’s recent comments on Trump’s Twitter activity is still unclear, but more details on the matter should be available on Sunday after his interview with TODAY airs in its entirety.