Jack Dorsey Criticizes Zuckerberg Over His Free-Speech Argument

Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey called out his counterpart at Facebook Inc., saying Mark Zuckerberg has a “major gap and flaw” in his argument for free speech on social media.

“We talk a lot about speech and expression and we don’t talk about reach enough, and we don’t talk about amplification,” Dorsey said at the Twitter News Summit in New York. “And reach and amplification was not represented in that speech.”

Zuckerberg gave a lengthy address at Georgetown University last week in which he explained that Facebook’s approach to content -- which favors letting people say whatever they want -- were part of an American tradition of free speech in the marketplace of ideas. He evoked the civil rights movement and other grassroots campaigns that were allowed to spread because of free speech.

Like Twitter, Facebook’s algorithm for sorting posts in a person’s social media feed gives heavier weight to those that users share and comment on. Often that means the most incendiary or surprising messages find their way to the biggest audience. Other than addressing his algorithm, Zuckerberg didn’t talk about the difference between content that naturally goes viral and promoted posts that people to send to a bigger audience.“It was a major gap and flaw in the substance he was getting across,” Dorsey said.

The two CEOs of rival social media companies are wrestling with how to police misinformation, hate speech and other controversial content on their sites. Zuckerberg started his Georgetown speech with a modification of Facebook’s origin story, saying that he built it in part as a reaction to the Iraq war, to give people a voice. In reality, it started as a tool to compare students’ attractiveness.“There’s some amount of revisionist history in all his storytelling,” Dorsey said of Zuckerberg. “It takes away from the authenticity and the genuineness of what we’re trying to do.”