I don't know if that's my first tweet, but it probably is.
Yeah, "Digesting a burrito." There you go. Yeah.
Look at me with my dumb tweets.
"Eating a baked potato and green beans."
You know, like...
"Hi. It's me. I'm on Twitter."
For none of my followers at the time.
HE LAUGHS OK.
"Continuing to work on things that will, apparently,
"destroy modern society."
I mean, that's a real hit-, by the gift of prophecy,
-in-the-face-type situation.
The social media platform Twitter
is now in the hands of the world's richest person.
Elon Musk completed the takeover,
which is worth more than £38 billion,
and swiftly began making changes at the company.
On the 28th of October 2022,
Elon Musk bought Twitter,
the most disruptive social media platform the world has ever seen.
Musk scrapped many of its controls on hate speech,
reinstated banned accounts, and changed the name to X.
Andrew Tate is back on Twitter.
It's good to be back on Twitter.
It was the end of a dream that had begun nearly 20 years earlier.
Among hipsters and high-school kids, Twittering is all the rage.
Do you Twitter?
It asks users one simple question - what are you doing?
T-W-T-T-R - Twitter.
Why do so many people want so many other people
to know everything about them?
Twitter's creators said they wanted to connect the world
and make it a better place.
People are using it for activism.
CHEERING
The smallest voices in the world should be heard.
A platform, in order to be a platform, has to be free.
Follow the tweets.
World leaders are on it, celebrities are on it.
Boom! It's in their brains.
What is happening?
This is the story of how their dream of a digital utopia turned sour
when they failed to control the dark side of their creation.
BLEEP all of them.
So are we the bad guys?
Please introduce yourself.
I'm Biz Stone.
I'm Jack Dorsey. Evan Williams.
And who are you? What do you do?
I'm Biz Stone.
THEY LAUGH
In 2005...
..uh, well, let's see.
We're just a ragtag group of people in a crummy office in San Francisco.
Just trying to, like, break new ground on new ideas
in a tech start-up.
I was just really excited about the possibilities.
And there's Evan in there.
Back then, it was really exciting. It was fun.
It was like, anything's possible.
And we really believed in the promise of the internet
and the promise of the democratisation of media
and everybody having a voice.
There was just a sense that something was happening.
A few miles away from their downtown office in South Park, San Francisco,
social media is exploding across Silicon Valley.
Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Myspace
are all starting to reshape how the world connects.
Ev Williams wants his start-up to be part of this revolution.
My favourite thing is
getting together with people and inventing stuff,
building stuff, coming up with new ideas,
collaborating, like, "Oh, we do this, we do this." It's...
It's a blast.
When you have amazing people and really creative people,
there's just this unbounded creativity and potential
that's in front of you.
And every so often...
One day Jack came into the office
and he wore a T-shirt that he had printed himself,
and it was a white T-shirt with big black letters,
and it had his phone number on it.
And it was a social experiment to see,
as he walked around San Francisco,
whether or not anyone would call him.
And if they did call the number, he would answer it,
and then he would have a conversation with the person.
Was there someone who was skilled in the ways of the pinata?
It was lively. There were a lot of characters.
It was a lot of fun.
Grab the rope.
It was very inventive.
Let's see real quick and say goodbye.
We were a real mix of, like, actual anarchists and,
you know, people who were dreamers,
people who, like, you know, believed in a world
that could be created through the internet.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
We were writing ideas on whiteboards,
kind of typical small start-up,
where you show up every day and you try to invent the future.
And we did what we called a hackathon.
We want to make something cool.
Everybody in the company was invited to take
their favourite interesting ideas
and interesting software or things they had always wanted to build,
and we all sort of put them on the virtual table.
At that moment, the internet wasn't quite yet on our phones.
This was pre-iPhone, but we sensed it.
It was, like, this is going to happen on the phones.
Let's, like, poke around and figure out what the right,
you know, version of that is.
Something like pictures with your phone.
Like, share a photo. I don't know, what... Something easy.
Like, one photo a day or something.
It was Hellodeo...
..that let you record, with your webcam, short videos
and post them to Myspace.
Something to do with album covers or something to do with music.
What are you listening to? Or something like this.
Jack and I had been finding every reason to work on projects together.
It's like when you're a little kid and you're in gym class
and the teacher says, like, "Find a partner."
And it was like, "I want Jack."
Jack was like, "What about, like, status updates
"where you can look at your group of friends
"and you don't even have to ask them how are they feeling,
"or what are they thinking or whatever, you could just see it."
And he said, "Do you think that's enough of a thing
"to make a whole thing out of?"
And I was like, I love it. It's so simple.
It's so simple that you could type something on the web
and it would make someone's pocket buzz.
And then they would look, you know,
fumble and take out their phone and see a message.
And it was just... We got excited about it.
And, um...
..nobody thought it was a good idea.
Jack's first idea was a list of your friends
and what they were doing, and that's it.
But I thought what felt novel and new ground was
right now. Like, oh, what's happening right now?
That felt intriguing.
That idea was evolving.
We were trying to come up with a name.
Someone suggested Ketchup
because you could catch up with your friends.
And someone suggested Friend Stalker.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
One of our co-workers, Noah Glass, liked the word "jitter".
And then he had a rhyming dictionary.
Noah sits in the back of the office, and he starts with A.
And he looks at every page for weeks until...
And, like, writing down the names he thinks might be good names,
until he gets to Tw...
And he discovers that "twitter" is a word, which is
the short bits of communication between birds.
You guys, this word is... It means...
It, like, describes what we're talking about, and it has
a reference to nature and birds. Like, that... It's perfect.
Twitter. That's a great name.
So after two weeks working on, you know, coding and stuff,
Jack was hooking things up in the background,
he was doing the programming and he was saying,
"Hey, I'm about to hook up so that
"when you write something into the field on the website,
"it should go to the phone. It should go to my phone."
He's like, "Are you ready?"
We built Twitter in two weeks
and after that we invited friends
and then invite, invite, invite.
PHONE BUZZES
You could hear everyone's phone buzzing, basically.
There was something that was easy about it,
that was seductive about it.
That interaction, it's just... It feels electric.
SMS was limited to 160 characters.
So we started limiting tweets to 150,
minus the length of your username.
I think Jack just decided
every message will only be 140 characters.
We embraced the constraint.
Make the canvas very small
and then anything you put on it is a masterpiece.
And you know what most people said when we signed them up for -
like, we got them using Twitter and we showed it to them?
They were like, "This is the stupidest thing ever."
And then some people would say,
"This is the stupidest thing ever,"
and become utterly addicted to it.
# One, two, three Take my hand and come with me
# Because you look so fine
# That I really wanna make you mine... #
South by Southwest, 2007.
Exactly what I'm talking about. Woo!
That's fuckin' weird.
I would encourage you to now use the internet.
Twitter needs to break out of its San Francisco bubble
and connect with the wider tech community.
They head to a music festival - South by Southwest.
This was a music and film festival,
and then we'll let some nerds show up,
to talk about the internet for a while.
So Ev had this idea of, we should do a marketing thing.
Everyone hangs out in the hallway
around the conference room where they have the panels.
So we put up a screen in the hallway.
Hi, Twitter. Panels, hallways or parties?
There was a lot of people there.
You could send something to your phone,
it would show up on the screen,
and you were able to see sort of which session was interesting,
which parties were people planning to go to.
It was this way in which people felt like,
oh, like, I need to be a part of this.
Twitter felt like this massive,
huge group text where just everyone was letting everyone know
about everything that was cool, that was happening.
We would be glued to our phones,
like, walking down the sidewalk looking at, like,
"Oh, wait, oh, there's a cool party happening here,
"and there's a bunch of people over here."
And because all of us, all of us bloggers
and tech people were there using it,
it just became this instant way of meeting up with people.
What was just totally amazing was
the story of this guy who had gone to this party,
and it was really loud and crowded, and it was too loud and crowded.
He wanted to talk shop with fellow nerds.
So he sent out a tweet saying,
"Does anyone want to meet over at this other place?"
And it was because he had sent the tweet to all the people
that followed him, and then they had sent the tweet saying,
"We're going here", "We're going here", "We're going"...
And it just multiplied like crazy.
And it was within, like, you know, a couple of minutes or something,
the place was completely filled
and there was a line around the block to get in.
As soon as I heard that, I remember thinking,
oh, my God, there's, like -
there isn't anything like this in among humans.
There's no technology that can make this behaviour happen.
From what I understand,
like, birds flying together in a flock and then coming to a tree
and then moving around it as if they're one organism.
And I thought, there's a lot of those types of things in nature,
but this is the first time I've ever heard of
one person able to mobilise
hundreds of people within, like, two minutes.
And I was like, oh, my God, I think we invented a whole new thing.
Where are we, anyways? We're at Twitter headquarters.
Twitter headquarters.
In beautiful South Park, San Francisco.
Yeah, it's beautiful. And who are you?
I'm Biz Stone. Now, what happened yesterday?
Oh, we got, uh... We got funding for Twitter.
Twitter receives $5 million in venture capital funding.
Ev becomes the largest shareholder
and must now appoint a CEO to run the new company.
Looking around the room, Jack was, you know,
the driver of the idea from day one. So I was like, run with it.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter's daddy.
CEO, right? Right.
I was happy to give him the shot,
but growth started to be the really hard problem.
It started growing more quickly than we could handle.
It's like you're playing a video game.
You get better as you're playing the game,
and it depends on how fast the video game gets hard -
does it get hard faster than you get better?
And Twitter got very hard, very fast.
I was in a situation where I had had a stalker
and that stalker followed me online.
Different social networks would often take the
harassing or abusive posts down,
and that was what was standard.
But then when I would go to Twitter, they weren't willing to do that.
Less than a year into the job,
Jack is facing the first evidence that Twitter has a dark side.
After South by Southwest,
I would regularly go to lunches with people from Twitter,
and I had known Jack as a, you know, acquaintance.
So I had this phone call with Jack,
and there was a concern from him about,
"Well, if we, you know, remove this account,
"if we remove these posts,
"that's not going to stop your stalker."
It's, like, this isn't about your responsibility
to take care of my stalker.
This is about your service being used to threaten and harass someone.
You know, you should absolutely ban this user.
But at the extreme least,
at least you should send a warning letting them know
that they're violating your terms of service.
At minimum, that's what I requested.
My impression of Jack on this phone call was
someone who is kind and listening,
but not necessarily understanding.
Someone who seemed a little bit confused about
why this was their problem.
About a month later, after eight more instances of
abuse and harassment, this is the reply that I got from Jack.
"Ariel, apologies for the delay here.
"We've reviewed the matter and decided it is not
"in our best interest to get involved.
"We've tasked our lawyers with a full review
"and update of our terms of service.
"Thank you for your patience and understanding
"and good luck with resolving the problem. Best, Jack."
There's a very strong tension between being open
in a way that allows everybody to have a voice...
..and to create a civil place where...
..trash doesn't take over.
And because of the speed of growth, you could say in retrospect,
we weren't as focused on the negatives
as we should have been in the early days.
There was a lot going on.
I think it was Ev who originally
coined the term hallucinogenically optimistic,
and that's what we were. That's what we were like.
You know, "Everyone's great. Everyone's very well-behaved."
The internet is swarming with sexual predators
who constantly stalk chat rooms, searching for children.
But Del Harvey is fighting back
by hunting down online paedophiles and bringing them to justice.
Please welcome, from perverted-justice.com, Del Harvey.
APPLAUSE
Del, what is it that you do exactly?
Well, essentially the organisation goes into online chat rooms
with underage profiles,
and if adults then contact those underage profiles
and solicit them for sex, we then contact the police
and work with them to prosecute and convict them.
To trap them, essentially.
Del Harvey is hired to manage any problems with content.
I started out as the first person
on what was originally called Spam and Abuse.
As they came across something new and awful,
they would be like, "Del, it looks like this is yours."
There's this analogy that I use,
which is an engineer comes to you and they're like,
"I've made the perfect kitten.
"It doesn't need food, doesn't need water.
"It will never grow old. It will never die.
"It is the perfect kitten."
And you look at the kitten and you're like,
"Why can this kitten shoot bullets?"
And they're like, "Well, that's not
"what you're supposed to use the kitten for.
"I told you all the things the kitten was intended to be used for."
And I'm like, "Yes."
And someone - whether accidentally or on purpose -
is going to shoot a bullet with this kitten.
Del was in charge of, you know,
Spam and Abuse or something like that.
Who wants to be on that team? That sounds terrible.
Let's make it Trust and Safety.
When I started Twitter,
they just asked me to come up with a plan for spam.
I came up with a three-strikes policy of,
you know, warning, second warning, then you're out.
I was like, "OK, guys, when do you want to meet and go through it?"
And they were like, "No, no, we're sure it's fine."
And I was like...
"Oh!"
There was a lot going on.
I wouldn't say we spent no time on it,
but other people are thinking about this stuff a lot.
I'm trusting people who I think are very good, and they were.
I mean, at that point, they were really more focused
on keeping the site up.
I'd be like, "Guys, my... This isn't working."
And they were like, "Yes, nothing is working. The whole site is down."
Whenever demand spikes, the site can't cope,
and it crashes constantly.
If you've ever played Jenga, it was like that.
When something broke, the whole pile fell down in a big mess.
It would break so often that I was like, well,
we need something right away to at least say, like,
"Hey, you know, we feel bad about it," you know?
I came across this really cute image of
a whale being lifted up by a bunch of little birds.
I thought, oh, this is a good metaphor. They're like,
"We're all working hard on a big job to fix the thing."
People nicknamed it the Fail Whale.
And then this weird thing happened.
It got popular.
I got invited to speak at the Fail Whale Conference.
People got tattoos of it.
When you go to the Twitter site, it's got the cute little whale
and it's all the light-blue picture...
It showed up so much
that it kind of became a cultural fetish object of its own.
The image of the whale itself became identified with this era.
You savaged the Fail Whale!
So we'd always be like, "Oh, the Fail Whale again."
And it's because either they had a surge in usage
or they're just incompetent.
They constantly were down and people were worried about
the ability of the company to stay afloat
because they couldn't run their service.
We'd raised funding and the pressure's on to make it grow,
and we're just still in survival mode.
Like, is this thing going to work?, is still the question.
I'm emailing Jack, like, "What are we going to do to make it grow?"
That started to get very, very stressful.
It was Jack's job to make it work. He's running the company.
Is Jack going to be the chief executive that,
like, goes through a hyper growth phase?
Is Jack going to be the one to stop the Fail Whale?
Is Jack going to be the CEO that's there to take you public
who, like, you know, investment banks are going to look at and say,
"Yeah, that's someone we can do business with"?
And it just didn't seem credible.
At least to me.
People were saying, like, well, also he was, like, you know,
leaving at 5:00 and he was taking these classes after work.
Jack has an eclectic range of outside interests -
yoga, sailing, drawing and tailoring.
I really wanted to see the world.
I wanted to be a sailor.
And I really wanted to be an artist.
I wanted to create something.
I wanted to show the world a new way to see itself.
We had a company, we had money.
We weren't just college kids in a garage -
we were a venture-funded company.
And it was just sort of... It was a mess.
Jack didn't have the experience and it felt very high stakes.
The people who decided to fire Jack,
in my head, it was just "the board" -
but it was really the people... It was the people I worked with.
And it was Evan, Jason Goldman
and some of our investors.
That sucks. Like, it sucks.
Like, you don't go into it, like, sort of hoping that the CEO fails.
Ev totally understood what Twitter could do,
and was frustrated with how it was being led
and decided that he wanted to take a turn.
And it was his company to choose.
HE CHUCKLES
Yeah, we fired him as CEO of a company he co-founded,
and he didn't really see it coming.
And that's bad.
And, um, you know, he was very upset.
He was very upset.
"So you all just fired him?"
Ev was like, "Yeah."
"So he's just wandering around somewhere
feeling really upset and alone?"
And Ev was like, "Oh, yeah, I guess so."
I could have taken that idea,
not told it to Ev, not told it to Biz,
not told it to all my other co-workers
and tried to start my own company with that idea.
But we had a great team.
So I found him and we met up at the Whole Foods,
where we used to have lunch a lot.
Jack was... He just felt terrible.
He said, "Well, I'm going to go back to the office.
"I'm going to tell everybody what I really feel, this was horrible.
"I feel like I've been punched in the gut.
"This was a bad decision."
And I said, "No, I don't... No.
"I don't think you should do that. You're still the man.
"Like, it's still a thing.
"You just don't get to work here every day."
I was angry. I was angry at the board.
I was angry at my co-founders. I was angry at myself.
I remember him saying this - "I'll come back like Steve Jobs."
And I remember thinking, like,
whatever makes you feel better. HE LAUGHS
After Jack was fired as CEO, he stayed on the board as chairman.
But in the two years after he's fired,
he refuses to speak in board meetings.
Like, literally never says a word again.
This is Lady Gaga, queen of Twitter.
May you always have soft cuticles while tweeting.
May you never have carpal tunnel.
With Lady Gaga leading the way,
Twitter has become a magnet for celebrities,
just as Ev takes over as CEO.
I'm doing an interview.
The future is here and things like Twitter allow,
you know, you to cut out the actual middleman.
I'm a Twitterer and I am obsessed with Twitter.
I just type something into my iPhone
and - boom! - it's in their brains.
When you have celebrities on Twitter,
you feel like you are part of the ephemeral of their lives.
There's an intimacy that you share on social media
that you don't share on other things,
and that was always there from the very beginning.
It's like, "Hi, I'm putting on a sock,"
and I've got 400,000 people reading this.
So anybody here on Twitter?
CHEERING
Hi, it's Friday Live and I'm on Twitter for the first time.
Sitting next to me is Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter.
Can you believe all this Tweedlee Dee stuff going on?
LAUGHTER
If you make a list of the best possible things that could happen,
going on Oprah, maybe number one.
But I hear you're a small company.
We're about 35 people right now. That's going to change, Evan.
Right. That's going to change. Yeah. Yeah.
She was going to send her first tweet.
Her producer was like, "Treat her like she's a kindergartener
"when it comes to the computer."
She types in her first tweet and then, by mistake,
she hits refresh on the browser
and we lose what she typed in the box.
So her first tweet had disappeared, but then they cut to commercial.
So I take the laptop back and I retype her tweet
and hit submit.
And so I actually sent Oprah's first tweet,
but I don't think anyone noticed.
Have a great weekend, Twitterers.
I think we had 400,000 sign-ups that day.
Twitter just captured media attention
in a way that almost nothing else did.
Like celebrities, democracy activists discover
Twitter gives them a direct line to their followers.
It is a political protest wrapped in a technological revolution.
Call it the Twitter effect.
It's helping getting information out.
THEY CHANT
People are using it for activism.
World leaders are on it. Celebrities are on it.
And we're, like, 30 people in an office in San Francisco.
What is happening?
THEY CHEER
The implications of this are far bigger than
just, like, the users of our little website talking to each other.
All Twitter posts have to be short.
Some find it limiting.
But, as one posting read today...
We had lots of utopian thinking
that, like, we have this new tool of liberation,
and because we can all connect in this new way,
all social problems will be easily dealt with.
You see your thing blowing up
and everybody using it and talking about it,
and we were pretty optimistic at that time.
This is great. This is providing this information,
awareness and knowledge that was not there before.
And it's changing the world.
While Twitter is saving the world, Kanye West turns up at the office
and performs an impromptu freestyle rap.
But the company is still failing to deal with the tech problems
that have plagued it from day one.
# Pour the champagne, let your watch show
# Shawty got a man watch, wrist look colossal... #
I wish I could say, man, isn't it going great?
We were on Oprah, and, like,
Kanye is coming by and, like, it's going awesome.
But the reality is, the service didn't work very well.
And so it was just like,
we're going to lose what's possible with this company.
I mean, how are we not going to mess this up?
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
You have to imagine you're just
showing up to a very hard job every day,
that's very exciting, but you feel like
the whole thing could die at any moment.
And so my efforts and the team's efforts, 90% are...
..how do we survive?
It didn't work a lot, and it was
a site that had to work perfectly all the time.
And it didn't. Nothing else went down like that, I'll tell you.
Facebook didn't. Google never did.
The time that really sticks out to me about that was Medvedev -
at the time, the president of Russia - comes to Twitter.
And he's going to tweet after he's created his account.
Like, wow.
And the site goes down.
Literally, no joke, the site crashes.
You've got snipers on the roof, bomb-sniffing dogs,
local law enforcement, secret service,
a bunch of Russians in John Wick outfits.
That morning at 8am, the US scores a goal
in stoppage time in the World Cup to avoid elimination.
CHEERING
Everyone tweets "Goal!" at the same time,
and the site goes down hard.
Dmitry Medvedev, who's, like, all of 5'7"
and wearing a denim suit for some reason,
is touring our cafeteria
and is going to send the first tweet
with, like, the political press corps covering this.
For security reasons, they shut down the elevators,
and I am in the third floor
and I've got to get to the sixth floor.
I've got to get past, like, the German Shepherds
and, like, the bomb squad and, like, the Counter Assault Team,
and, like, get up to the sixth floor and be like, "Stop!"
We were like, "Oh, why don't we show you around?"
Like, oh, God, what are we going to do? Like...
We had to walk real slow and we were like,
"Over here is the restroom. You have to use it? You could use it.
"If you want to use it, take your time. There's no rush."
When the windows are open, it's a lot better. Yeah.
I'm now up there.
I've, like, been calling down to the third floor.
"Is it OK for him to tweet?" "Yes, we think it will go through."
It's like, OK!
CHEERING
There we go. All right.
"Greetings to everyone," he says,
"I'm at Twitter and this is my first tweet."
I remember thinking, like, yeah, this is an example of, like,
hey, we need to get serious about, like,
getting this place buttoned up.
Twitter's technical issues cripple its growth
and deter crucial investment in its future.
Twitter has always underperformed, all the time.
It's really kind of hysterical how bad they are.
It's the loudest platform and the saddest little business.
Why - you know, as entrepreneurs -
why are you so little focused on the dollars at this point?
Um, I wouldn't say we're not focused on the dollars.
We're trying to take a really long-term perspective
about how we build a valuable
and large company, and it's...
That takes time. We only have so many resources.
My Spidey-Sense started to indicate that maybe Ev had started to
kind of lose the plot with some of the board.
I thought things were going reasonably well,
given the chaotic nature of this beast we had created.
But there were complaints.
Um...
And then I was kneecapped.
Somehow I'd lost enough control to be fired without notice.
I just went from...
..running the company that I owned 100% of...
..a little, you know, a few years earlier,
to, I was out.
After the whole thing, I was really hurt
and I kind of wanted to crawl into a hole and leave.
But also, like, I helped do the same thing to Jack,
you know, years before, and so maybe it's karma.
So I'm like, why is my friend being fired? What's happening?
I'm like, I don't understand why people are behaving like this.
It took me a long time to realise -
money and power. HE CHUCKLES
Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief operating officer
and a seasoned businessman, takes over from Ev.
All the rooms are named for birds? Yeah. Oh, I love that.
I definitely want that one.
When I first started at Twitter as CEO, I think it's fair to say
that I thought it was a little too, like, lax.
Let me get a wide shot, and then...
VOICEOVER: I was on the elevator at one point,
and one of the people on the team was like, "The site crashed again."
And he kind of laughed.
I remember thinking, like, man, I mean, enough is enough, you know?
The two things we had to do were start to make money
and stop the site from crashing.
Oh, thanks, Kelly.
Dick knew user growth was going to be,
you know, a massive thing that we needed.
We needed to have a reliable site.
So his number-one priority was killing the Fail Whale.
Dick orders his engineers to focus on one thing only -
rebuilding the site from the bottom up.
Like, redoing the underlying architecture
so that we can add more users and add more tweets per second
without taking the system down was a Herculean effort.
They thought it was impossible. They thought, this isn't going to work.
And Dick was just like, "It has to be possible."
Five months later, we killed the Fail Whale
and it never came back.
I mean, it's crazy to think about,
but it was like a momentous occasion in the company.
CHEERING
So now the CEO is a guy that we hired from outside of Twitter.
And I don't know how many months later it was,
but I was like, what am I doing?
What should I do? You know?
So I said, "Hey, Dick, I'm thinking I'm just going to leave
"and go work with Ev down the street."
And he was like, "OK."
I was like, all right. That was easy.
I think it was a mistake to get rid of the founders.
And it's because the founders of companies
have the vision of where it comes from.
And if you come in as a takeover CEO
and you don't have people in the room that were there
from the beginning,
then you lose the threat.
If we go around the room and introduce yourself.
VOICEOVER: So when Biz went off with Ev to do his new thing,
I mean, people looked at me as, like,
the business guy who's now in charge of the whole company.
So I decided we need to have one of the founders back at Twitter.
Dick was going to focus on the monetisation of the business,
growing globally.
You know, make the right strategic moves to build Twitter.
Jack wanted to keep Twitter truly like an open,
global town square, where everyone of all different views
can come together and speak openly.
I didn't meet Jack until he came back.
And that was just weird...
..for a lot of reasons.
Jack's weird.
I mean, this is not going to be the first time you hear this.
This is not going to be the last time you hear it. Jack's weird.
And weird in a way that I can't even begin to describe.
And I've met a lot... I mean, I've met a lot of weird people.
There was one meeting where he started off the meeting by
just playing The Beatles song Blackbird.
Kind of the plaintive music, quiet music,
you know, in the room.
# Blackbird singing in the dead of night
# Take these broken wings and learn to fly
# All your life
# You were only waiting for this moment to arise. #
He gets up on stage and everyone is dead silent.
It seemed very conceptual. He showed pictures of a bridge.
For some people, I think it was really meaningful
and meant something to them.
A bunch of other people were like,
"What in the actual heck is this supposed to mean to me?"
Like, what is happening?
Is this just a bird-themed song that you're using
while talking about Twitter taking flight? OK.
Yes, it was like a big moment. People were teary-eyed.
It felt like this big moment, you know?
There was a great deal of respect for Jack across the employee base.
And Jack was as close to anyone on
this planet in terms of
what we wanted Twitter to be.
And he had that founder authority.
NEWSREADER: Outrage in a St Louis community today after an unarmed
teen was shot and killed by police.
We are... PROTESTERS: ..Mike Brown!
You must disperse immediately.
You are in violation of a state-imposed curfew.
PROTESTERS: Don't shoot!
The death of Mike Brown, a young African American,
sparks months of protests
helping ignite the Black Lives Matter movement.
NEWSREADER: Protesters walking the street, remembering Michael Brown,
demanding justice by tweeting it
all out on their smartphones and tablets.
Their ability to do that
defined, in part, by this very ordinary-looking guy
who took to the streets himself yesterday.
St Louis native Jack Dorsey
is the billionaire co-founder of Twitter.
I was just wondering whether, can we just have a few
words with you? No. No, you're not chatting.
OK, so we need to look you up online.
OK. I'm there. I'm easy to find. OK.
I remember being in Ferguson, Missouri,
and all of a sudden I look up
and it's this white guy in a T-shirt
and a hat, and I'm like,
I think that's the Twitter guy.
I'm like, I feel pretty confident that's the Twitter guy.
But what I appreciated about Jack
was that it was solidarity without...
You know, he made the StayWoke T-shirts,
he like, cared, he was willing to, like, be up front
and public about it without apologising.
And I respected that because a lot of people,
especially in tech at the time, were, like,
hedging their bets around it.
And he was like, "I was at the protest," and you're like,
"Yes, you were at the protest," you know?
No justice... PROTESTERS: ..No peace!
On one screen,
I have the CNN website and Fox News and MSNBC,
and on the other I have my Twitter streams.
And I'm watching photos of fires
and police overreacting
and militarised vehicles
and people being arrested and beat.
There is nothing on MSNBC or Fox or CNN.
SCREAMS
People there are saying, "We're being tear gassed"
and the police are, like, "We're not using tear gas."
And I'm looking at a picture of
a tear gas canister on the ground
from my Twitter feed.
Twitter fundamentally changed
a lot of how the public perceives the mainstream media.
And sometimes I think about that as being a good thing,
and maybe not such a good thing.
PROTESTERS: Hands up! PROTESTERS: Don't shoot!
With Twitter spreading the message, protests mount across America.
There is a reason that Black Lives Matter started out as a hashtag.
The social media platforms gave the people an ability to have
a voice and have connection,
and reach an audience, and build a network.
Does a platform have to be neutral?
I think a platform is best
when it carries every voice
and every voice... You carry every voice but got an opinion.
You're wearing a stay StayWoke shirt.
You went out and protested in Ferguson. Yeah.
Your politics - seems like we could identify
what some of your politics are.
HE CHUCKLES
Yeah. I do believe we need to build a platform that respects
and amplifies every voice in a way that the world needs to hear it.
We said, "We're the free-speech wing of the free-speech party."
You know, the notion that the smallest voices
in the world should be heard is 100% true.
There was a real belief that good speech would outweigh bad speech.
That the solution was to be radically open.
You know, this is how Twitter got the reputation of being
the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.
But the problem is, there's always a dark underbelly.
How are they going to moderate people being a jerk?
It's like a bar that suddenly turns bad, right?
If you don't have a bouncer in there,
you're going to have a bad situation.
And they never had a bouncer.
NEWSREADER: Tonight, violent depictions of women being beaten,
raped and run over by cars.
It's not the movies, it's video games.
And now the women calling for change in this multibillion dollar virtual
industry are facing a very real backlash, including death threats.
Twitter's free-speech stance makes it vulnerable
when a group of female video game creators are targeted.
Known as Gamergate, it's the first
coordinated harassment campaign of its kind.
And you could see the aggression
that was lurking in the dark recesses of this site.
It's not all fun and games in the world of online gaming.
Last weekend, one woman was forced out of her home.
She's believed to be the third
woman who's needed to go into hiding as a result.
They threatened to murder me,
to rape me.
They threatened to sever my husband's genitals
and choke me to death with them.
Anti-men, anti-gamers, yeah, fuck all of them!
We can't unleash the ability of everyone to communicate
and not expect everyone to communicate.
And not all of those people are going to be a reflection
of your values.
And if you're one of these feminazis...
She should just fricking die in a fire.
We obviously already had a policy that was like Whac-A-Mole.
Harm is done, we respond to
that harm by warning people and removing tweets.
But by that point in 2014,
we had a billion tweets about every couple of days.
So even if you're getting all the bad stuff
99.9999% of the time,
that's still a lot of not-good stuff slipping through the cracks.
People would say, "Well, just ban these words."
"OK, well, those words are in a Kanye song,
"so can he not post the lyrics to his song?"
It turns out it's always more complicated and there are always
consequences you didn't consider that happen next.
Ooh, death threat, ooh.
In truth, it's the feminists who are the oppressors.
Misogynistic abuse on Twitter spreads to the UK.
Well, joining me now from our studio in San Francisco
is Twitter's Head of Trust and Safety, Del Harvey.
Do you accept you've messed this up?
It's a heck of an opening. Thanks for having me here.
I'm like, all right,
I think I'm ready for anything.
And the first question that they hit me with is,
"Del Harvey, do you agree that you have failed women?"
Like, all of them?
Have you failed these women who have
to go to local police forces
to report the appalling abuse they're getting on Twitter?
Well, we actually take action on the accounts as is.
So I think that...
Have you failed them so far, though?
This highlighted that, had some of the tools and systems that I asked
for been in place, those accounts would have been suspended
without getting to that point.
Honestly, a lot of the tooling that was built to fight abuse
was written by interns.
It just wasn't a priority,
and it wasn't a priority because the majority of people
at Twitter weren't ever exposed to the abuse.
And I think that was why
Del wouldn't get the resources she needed.
It's not just a naive philosophy.
It's a privileged philosophy.
I want to live in a world where I can actually see all opinions.
It's up to me to decide which one is truly valuable.
I mean, I think the main purpose of Twitter is to make sure
that we let every voice flow.
It's a great aspirational ideal.
If only there weren't certain types
of content that were actually inherently
damaging for people to be exposed to.
Jack was more of a purist on the free-speech issue, I'd say.
He can be a bit obtuse at times, you know.
I think he would say, "Go figure out the details for yourself."
But the devil is in the details on free speech.
That's the problem.
Do you regret going all out on the free speech?
No, I don't, because it was, like, so inspiring and awesome
when it was working.
I felt like we were slow to evolve to a more
complex understanding of free speech.
I wrote an internal email that got published externally
about how bad we were at dealing with abuse.
"We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform,
"and we've sucked at it for years.
"I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt
"with this issue during my tenure as CEO.
"It's absurd. There's no excuse for it." Signed, me.
When Dick emailed the company and was like,
"We suck at abuse," in a lot of ways, my reaction to that was,
"Yes, because you haven't invested in combating it."
Twitter's moderation policies are failing.
BURST OF GUNFIRE
Islamic State got on to Twitter pretty much the same way as
everybody else.
They had been creating accounts
that had, like, four variations of their flag,
and we started pattern matching those and taking action on those.
And so they started changing their profile pictures
while they were trying to gain followers to pictures
of kittens or puppies.
So there were all of these adorable,
cute kittens or puppies
in the profile picture and then it would be like,
"Isis will take revenge on America."
You know, we did do a lot of moderation and taking
their accounts down, and so they started to target us.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo confirmed that
he and his employees received death threats
after deleting accounts associated with Isis.
Now cut to July 2015.
I was, like, getting death threats all the time.
I was the target for all these things that people -
the bad things that happen to people and, like, doing that on a daily,
daily basis after you feel like you've accomplished your goals,
I was like, enough is enough.
How you doing?
Good. Dick. Dick, over here. Turn that mic on.
How are you? Good, how are you? Good.
What do you think you'll do next? Ah, we'll see.
I'm going to give myself a bunch of time to take
some time off and think about that. Thanks. Thank you.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
REPORTER: It's official. Jack Dorsey is Twitter's new permanent CEO.
There he is. He's walking in the door.
He's right there.
Hey. Good morning.
Eight years after being fired,
Jack Dorsey is back on the throne as Twitter's CEO.
It certainly had to be a moment of, "I'm back."
I mean, there's no way you can be human
and having been removed from a role
and then asked to please come back
and take this role and not think, "Hell, yes."
Like, "All right, I'm back."
I mean, there has to be some of that in your mind, or you're not human.
Pretty soon after Jack got back as CEO,
he started wrapping his head around, like, what the situation really was.
REPORTER: Dorsey needs to address key problems.
Twitter's shares are sagging.
There were pressures that you have from investors and advertisers.
We'd had two rounds of lay-offs. It was not good.
It was awful.
REPORTER: Look at Twitter. That company
is suffering from zero user growth. OK?
It just stagnated. And in this industry,
if you stop growing, you die.
Twitter is facing fierce competition from new platforms like Instagram,
which are siphoning off potential users and advertisers.
But an unlikely saviour emerges.
CHANTING: We want Trump. We want Trump.
There's this idea that the goal of
the Twitter game is to never be the central character,
because that's the one everyone is hating on.
Trump pushes himself into prominence
by learning how to make himself the central villain of every day.
It was just like, "Oh, this guy understands how
"to capture media attention using the platform."
He knew how to, like, write a tweet
and, like, that's what people would report on.
With Twitter at its heart, Trump's campaign gains momentum.
..the politicians, number one...
REPORTER: Focusing on the debate tonight,
the market could react if Trump has a very good showing.
One stock worth watching today - Twitter.
Shares jumping more than 4% on Friday. Wow.
In the beginning, it was the - quote, unquote - "Trump Bump".
Advertisers were throwing a heck
of a lot of dollars at Twitter
because the conversation was there
and the people were there.
SHOUTING
When you are running these places,
the thing that creates traffic is anger and rage.
And so one of the things I always say was
enragement equals engagement.
He made it OK to wear your hate on your sleeve.
And he did it in such a way that it made it harder for companies
like Twitter to moderate that type of content.
When you have 50 million accounts tweeting,
retweeting, reposting hate speech...
There was content coming out in 2016
where we were imploring Jack to ban him.
We were just like, "Dude, you have got to get this guy off
"your platform."
Every small act of kindness...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It didn't matter how bad Trump was,
he always was using Twitter to dominate the news cycle.
And if he was removed, it would
be damaging to shareholder value
and the board would remove the CEO.
Between Facebook and Twitter,
and I guess Instagram,
I have 28 million people.
It's a modern form of communication.
This should be nothing you should be ashamed of.
It's where it's at.
REPORTER: Donald J Trump will soon be our 45th president.
I think it is true that you probably didn't have
a lot of Trump supporters
or Trump voters in the executive suite of Twitter.
When Trump was elected,
I think there was a little bit of a beat inside on,
"Have we enabled Donald Trump to such
"an extent that it put him into the White House?"
I remember HR might have offered
the next day off for people who were, like,
emotionally overwhelmed.
Even more extreme voices now flood the platform.
CHANTING
SHOUTING
A lot of people are puzzled why...
Like, how hard is it to get rid of Nazis from Twitter?
And we're waiting. And we look in
and you're showing this extraordinary calm,
but we're all standing outside saying,
"Jack, turn the ...'kin wheel."
I mean, will you do that?
Yeah, yes. And we have been moving substantially.
I mean, we are working as quickly as we can,
but quickness will not get the job done.
Facing mounting criticism, Jack withdraws from the spotlight.
CHANTING
He really withdrew from people.
Like, he did a lot of meditation,
he did these retreats.
It didn't feel like he was
really talking to anybody at Twitter.
There ended up being this weird cult of a personality around him.
All these, like, lifestyle articles about
what his diet is this week and what exercise he does.
Sometimes he'd show up, sometimes he wouldn't.
Then he'd lay down a track and then he'd leave.
Like, that kind of thing.
"Genius. Got to go.
"I'm going to Sri Lanka to stare at, you know, a finch."
I don't know. Whatever. He was always on to something like that.
It felt as though there were a lot of performative aspects into how
he was presenting himself.
And then people wanted to believe that this was like...
Here's somebody who is a founder who they could believe in.
And then things just got weirder.
# Love where you work
# Love who you work with... #
In January 2020, there was a huge Twitter-wide conference called
OneTeam in Houston, Texas.
Ha-ha!
There we go. OK. OK. We got some sun.
How's everyone feeling now?
It was really a blast. I mean, we just had fun.
It was a chance for everyone to connect.
MUSIC: We Will Rock You
Jack really wanted just
to go back to the roots of the heart of Twitter.
Bringing everyone together,
just lifting up the culture, you know? Mm.
That was what we wanted. That's what we wanted.
At one point, Jack
stood in front of 4,000 colleagues and said
that he would be leading us in a 15-minute silent meditation.
There were, like, little salt juice packets under everybody's seats.
It was like the weirdest Oprah "check under your seat" giveaway
you can imagine.
Water, Himalayan salt and lemon juice.
I mean, listen, I drank the Twitter Kool-Aid,
but I didn't do the... I didn't do the lemon water.
There were elements of OneTeam
that were absolutely fun, right?
And then there's also like, sometimes, like, forced fun.
Why not dial in Elon Musk to OneTeam?
Whoo!
LAUGHTER
Wow. It's, like, prophetic.
And then a number of folks got sick.
We did have team members, I believe,
that were flying through Wuhan,
to get to OneTeam.
There was literally a hashtag,
hashtag, like, #OneVirus
that everybody was talking about.
From this evening I must give
the British people a very simple instruction.
You must stay at home.
REPORTER: Efforts to contain the fast-spreading coronavirus
are being strained as infections and deaths rise rapidly worldwide.
Now there's this technology that is potentially
spreading misleading information really rapidly.
Like, you know, if you get Covid,
all you got to do is take a gallon of Ivermectin
and you'll be fine in the morning.
That was actually
what led us to roll out the first labels around misinformation.
We were no longer taking
a hands-off approach on this stuff.
It probably won't come as a surprise to you
that Jack was not a fan of labelling,
and he was even less of a fan of removing content.
I don't know that we ever convinced Jack that we were right,
but we at least got him to sign off on the policies.
The next thing you know, like, we have a misinformation policy
and it was a rushed job, right?
Like, the policy was...
..written quickly and constantly changing.
And when you start saying, like, something is true
or it is not, like, you are becoming an arbiter of truth.
Facts are problematic these days. Like, whose facts?
Which facts? Who were they from?
Twitter was the perfect place
for tons and tons of misinformation about many things,
including from Donald Trump - particularly in an election year.
NEWSREADER: President Trump responding
after Twitter flags two of his tweets,
the president tweeting - quote -
There's a lot of pushback on the censorship of speech.
It became a cause celebre for the right to say, like,
oh, these companies are run by a bunch of squishy liberals
and they're using their tools to, like, oppress us.
And so we're going to have a bunch of hearings.
Mr Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of
what the media are allowed to report and what the American
people are allowed to hear? We're not doing that.
And this is why I opened this hearing
with calls for more transparency.
We realise we need to earn trust more.
We realise...
I think it stopped being fun for Jack.
He was so unhappy about having to weigh in.
We were trying to figure out,
what can we do proactively here?
We would cast stones
and read tea leaves in an attempt
to interpret whatever it was that Jack actually wanted.
Joseph R Biden Jr is elected the 46th President
of the United States, winning the White House and
denying President Trump a second term.
It is announced that Joe Biden is the winner,
and then the conversation is, like, is Donald Trump going to come on
the platform and deny the election results, right?
Because he was doing it verbally.
He did.
DONALD TRUMP: We were getting ready for a big celebration.
We... We were winning everything.
And all of a sudden it was just called off.
Trump gets on Twitter,
starts denying the election results.
I remember sending messages to folks in leadership saying,
like, "I am very concerned about what is going to happen."
But there was a fear - we'll go too far,
we'll piss Donald Trump off. Like, something will happen.
Indecision became the decision.
And then came the morning of January 6th.
I am not allowed to say what's going to happen today...
..because everyone's just going to have to watch for themselves.
But it's going to happen.
CROWD SHOUTING
I was literally on Twitter, right? Like, I was on twitter.com,
scrolling, seeing what was happening.
CROWD SHOUTING
We're trying to help you. We're trying to help you.
I had gotten called into a meeting when the Capitol was breached.
#ExecuteMikePence is trending.
And I was given the instructions, "Make the insurrection stop."
CROWD CHANTS: USA.
Within a couple of hours we had new guidance
that was drafted specifically for January 6th.
And, you know, we started taking down tweets, right?
MAN'S VOICE: There's a real nightmare scenario unfolding.
So many entrances and tunnels and mazes.
And then Trump starts tweeting.
There's never been a time like this where such a thing happened,
where they could take it away from all of us - from me,
from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election.
So we didn't really have a choice
but to take it down and suspend the account.
We said if there are any other violations of any kind,
this account will be permanently suspended.
48 hours later,
Trump's temporary suspension is over.
He starts tweeting again.
DONALD TRUMP: You'll never take back our country with weakness.
The responses to his tweets were, like, message heard loud and clear.
You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
We got it. We know what to do.
It was very much this dog whistle of violence.
With Trump deemed to have violated Twitter's rules yet again,
a decision must now be made.
Because it's Donald Trump,
goes up to Jack Dorsey, who was in French Polynesia on his yacht.
I think Jack was very concerned about,
are we biased in our enforcement?
This goes against so many things
that he really passionately believed.
But the degree to which people
were taking this as a call to violence was clear.
I think that's why when we made
the recommendation to ban the President,
there was not pushback.
And so Donald Trump was kicked off of Twitter.
CROWD SHOUT
SCATTERED APPLAUSE
Everyone telling you that you're responsible
for the ruin of politics around the world sucks.
It sounds miserable. I mean, would you want that?
NEWSREADER: The social media and
business world was rocked today,
by the surprise resignation of
Jack Dorsey as CEO of Twitter.
So I think that, in some ways,
Jack may have been struggling with a company that was going
in a direction very different from the direction that he hoped for.
As the only significant shareholder on the board,
Jack still holds power over Twitter's future.
For Jack, only one person can now restore Twitter to being
the platform where all voices can be heard.
I think what he decided to do
in the first instance was just to say,
"I'm going to quit and turn the company over to someone else."
But then he came up with idea two,
which was - maybe Elon should just buy it.
Jack and Elon were very friendly
and Elon has proven himself at other organisations.
Is there anyone else on earth
that could best figure this thing out?
And I think he turned to his friend Elon.
Any more comments? Were you guys listening?
But I'm curious, what do you guys think?
NEWSREADER: Breaking news. Twitter has just accepted Elon Musk's offer.
Twitter will become a privately owned company by Elon Musk.
Jack's tweet about how Elon was the singular solution
and the light of consciousness that he would trust to lead Twitter,
seemed like it was just going to clearly be one of
the worst tweets of all time.
Like, how did you come up with
"he's the only one that can fix Twitter"?
I want to know, what evidence did you have that he could do that?
It went from being something that we tried very hard to not have -
be a political tool, in a lot of ways - to a political tool.
NEWSREADER: Elon Musk says he would reverse former
President Trump's ban on the social media platform,
Musk calling the ban "morally wrong".
Musk reinstates thousands of banned accounts
and rolls back restrictions on misleading information.
He lays off around 80% of the staff working to reduce harmful content.
Elon decimated the Trust and Safety team.
He didn't care about it.
He didn't care about trust or safety.
He was a real mistake. It was a real mistake to do that.
I didn't think Elon would destroy Twitter
or tear it apart the way he did.
CROWD CHEERS
Elon's purchase of Twitter was very calculated.
I think he wanted more power. You know,
he is shifting rightward. I could see it.
ELON MUSK: Er, here we are at the...at the merch thing,
and there's an entire closet full of... Secret closet. ..of #Woke.
There's this narrative of Jack Dorsey, the benevolent,
and, like, Elon Musk of the evil, in the sort of wicked versus good,
right? And I think it does us a disservice to make these,
like, fairy tales out of this story.
If the Twitter of yesteryear was so perfect,
how did it crumble so fast? Right? Clearly,
the foundation wasn't as good as a lot of people thought that it was.
What all of us were doing
was democratising the means of communications.
But the reality is that you can't have universal free speech,
because the speech of some silences the speech of others.
Everybody always sees it subjectively.
"Why don't you moderate those bad people?"
"Why are you censoring me?"
The social media site Twitter is going through a radical rebrand.
Elon Musk, who owns it, of course, says it's now called X.
Elon reinstated my Twitter account
after taking it back - personally.
My name is Katie Hopkins.
I am a straight white Christian.
CROWD CHANTS Come on, get back, get back.
It's good to be back on Twitter.
Don't believe what you read. Don't believe the mainstream.
Talk to this gentleman, look, this gentleman here.
Argh! Argh!
It turns out that Twitter is harder than rocket science.
It's actually really, really, really sad
because people really believed in Jack.
Part of what has been so hard about what's happened has been
the really sense of deep personal betrayal
that a lot of employees have felt.
It's hard to be, like,
very kind of pro- the Twitter legacy at this point.
It's going to be remembered
for this long tail of knock-on effects,
of people trying to advance right-wing authoritarianism
and explicitly anti-democratic agenda,
both domestically but also across the world.
We built this thing that took on a life of its own.
It has these bad elements and its good elements,
and the battle is trying to have the good outweigh the bad.
And that's what felt like is maybe a losing battle over time - was, like,
is it worth it?
And there's Mr Evan in there.
Is this whole idea flawed?
Haha! Ooh!
Is social media good or is it just, like... Was it a bad idea?
Was it just the wrong idea? Should we just move on?
Should we say, hey, that was an interesting experiment...
Follow me!
..goofy things happened...
I'm Biz Stone.
..we had some laughs...
..and let's move on?
I don't know.
MUSIC: Helicopter by Bloc Party