Sean Hannity asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday to explain how his platform might act against a user who tweets about punching the Fox News host in the face.
Dorsey appeared on Hannity’s radio show to discuss why Twitter won’t suspend conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his InfoWars publications, even after several rival platforms did so. In a series of tweets late Monday, Dorsey explained that Jones simply hadn’t violated Twitter’s rules.
During their conversation, Hannity pressed Dorsey on how Twitter does crack down on users who violate their policies. He asked about people calling for some type of violence of any kind or threatening violence against an individual. He noted earlier in the program that he personally has seen “vile, vicious” threats against him on social media.
[Opinion: Twitter’s Jack Dorsey nails the Alex Jones situation]
Dorsey replied: “Any sort of violent speech and encouragement towards violence, harassment, is directly against our terms of service, and we’d take immediate action on it.”
“What if somebody, now it gets more nuanced,” Hannity replied, before mimicking what a user might say: “‘Ah, I wish somebody would just punch Hannity in the face.’ What do you do then?”
Dorsey cautioned that context would have to be taken into account.
“We have to really understand what the context of the conversation is, and this is extremely hard for an algorithm to do and certainly hard for humans to do. So we make sure that all of our folks understand the cultural context when something is said,” he said. Dorsey stressed the importance of appropriate action, including warnings with notices and a temporary lock of an account so that a tweet is reviewed or deleted along with “ideally” giving an explanation for their actions.
Dorsey also conceded that Twitter will “certainly miss threats.”
Hannity was sympathetic, repeatedly saying Twitter is dealing with a “complicated” and “nuanced” situation, but did stress that he is concerned about how technology companies are moving in the direction of censorship against conservatives.
Recently, Twitter came under fire when it was revealed that some Republican figures were being “shadow banned,” where their accounts were experiencing decreased visibility in the social media platforms search function. Twitter asserted that “shadow banning” is not something the company does, and in a blog post attributed what happened to being an “issue” that was quickly resolved.
Asked about it by Hannity, Dorsey said, “We do not shadow ban according to political ideology, viewpoint, or content — period.” He did suggest the negative “behaviors” by users to play a role in how visible they are in their visibility rank.
