Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg regarding the meddling prior to the 2016 presidential election, as well as the general abuse that occurs on their respective platforms.
During his testimony, Dorsey was forced to address accusations of shadow banning, as members of GOP including President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have cried political bias from social media platforms.
The controversy has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, in the wake of Alex Jones (who was also present for the hearing) getting banned from most corners of the internet—as well as some prominent alt-right personalities being stripped of their blue check mark on Twitter.
“We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially,” Dorsey said in his prepared testimony. “In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.”
He continued, pointing out an analysis of data that implied single tweets by Republican members of Congress and Democratic members of Congress are viewed an approximately equal amount of times.
And that’s all well and good. Transparency is great! But, what’s really worth noting, is that the sometimes-bearded Dorsey appeared before the Senate looking like a dang extra from Game of Thrones.
https://twitter.com/kyalbr/status/1037344707431604229
That is indeed some goatee he’s got there. Others had plenty of ideas of what Dorsey’s goatee made him look like, and the guy ended up becoming a meme on his own platform as the jokes came in strong.
Jack Dorsey looks like he’d start a speech at an elementary school with, “You think marijuana is funny? Yeah, I thought it was funny too” pic.twitter.com/QSxW2P1jsu
— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) September 5, 2018
Thank you, Chairman Burr, Vice Chairman Warner and the committee for this opportunity to say sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it pic.twitter.com/z3YmL6Qx7X
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) September 5, 2018
https://twitter.com/loudmouthjulia/status/1037339825463013376
https://twitter.com/iSmashFizzle/status/1037341391293169665
https://twitter.com/ksgant/status/1037357252351549441
issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them” pic.twitter.com/mBfCczPO1I
— jordan (@JordanUhl) September 5, 2018
Welp, if it were his intention to distract with that thing, we’d say mission accomplished. And speaking of accomplished missions, maybe next he can take on banning literal Nazis from running around on his platform? Baby steps, we suppose.
