Co-Founder, Block Head & Chairman, Block, Inc.
Extended Interview: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Talks Alex Jones & Election Security | NBC Nightly News
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sat down with NBC News’ Lester Holt for an exclusive interview, discussing the decision to give Alex Jones a ‘timeout,’ criticism of Twitter’s policies and its ongoing battle against bots.
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About Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey discussed Block's Q1 2025 financial results, projecting gross profit growth of 12% for the year and an acceleration to low double digits in the third quarter. He noted that Square is gaining market share following consolidation efforts and that the company received FDIC approval to use Square Financial Services for nationwide consumer loans through Cash App Borrow, which he said roughly doubles the number of actives eligible for the product and improves unit economics. Dorsey also highlighted the integration of Afterpay products into Cash App, describing it as a "meaningful unlock" that exposes buy-now-pay-later products to 57 million monthly actives. At The Bitcoin Conference 2026, Dorsey appeared with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki to support the documentary "The Six Billion Dollar Man" about Julian Assange. Dorsey described Bitcoin as "an open protocol for money transfers" that routes around gatekeepers such as Visa, Mastercard, and banks. He also argued that traditional corporate hierarchy is obsolete, saying that companies can operate as "mini AGI" by placing an artificial intelligence "intelligence layer" at the center of the organization. Dorsey stated that after experimenting with AI tools in late 2024, Block's leadership uniformly agreed that if they were to rebuild the company from scratch, it would not be the same size or structure.
Transcript (48 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
I
Interviewer0:00
Well, Alex Jones on Twitter posted this week what is essentially a video calling for people to get their battle rifles ready against the media, saying it's time to act, it's got to be done now. Move criminally against people. Send a chill up my spine. How about yours?
J
Jack Dorsey0:19
It did. I mean, there's a number of actions that we believe helped a call to incitement to violence, and those are the things that we need to make sure that we are protecting a broader collective and we're taking action on.
I
Interviewer0:35
You have taken action against him in this instance. What is it? Can you tell us what it is?
J
Jack Dorsey0:39
We put him in a timeout, removing his ability to tweet for a time period. Just a short time period.
I
Interviewer0:49
For a short time period. This is consistent with how we enforce these particular rules. At what point though do you have to recognize a pattern, not just a single tweet or a single video, but a pattern of hate-filled and threatening speech?
J
Jack Dorsey1:02
Well, we have to look more broadly across all actions and also make sure that we're looking at our current policies and evolving our policies under the changing circumstances that we see around us as well.
I
Interviewer1:16
Your peers Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Apple took stronger action against Alex Jones. You stood on the sidelines. You said he hadn't violated your policies.
J
Jack Dorsey1:27
The most important thing for us is that we are consistent in applying our enforcement. That is critical. We can't build a service that is subjective just to the whims of what we personally believe.
I
Interviewer1:42
Is that what your peers did? About to win? That's... I can't state what their internal decision-making process was. We were focused on ours. We need to make sure that we are applying our rules consistently. Our rules are people come to our service, they agree to a Terms of Service, and that is what we need to look at. It doesn't mean that we can't evolve those rules, so it doesn't mean that we can't change those rules, but we need to inform people of those changes and why they matter and how they affect behaviors on the platform going forward.
But doesn't it concern you to hear things like a call to arms on your platform? Just put aside the rules for a minute. Is there not a moral obligation? Is there a gut check that you know with you or your organization in these situations?
J
Jack Dorsey2:28
Well, it is concerning. I mean, we have to put the safety of individuals first in every single thing that we do, and we need to enforce our rules and also evolve our rules around that. So the actions by accounts like Jones can be dangerous, and they can be things that have real-world effects off the platform, and we need to make sure that we're taking that into consideration and evolving our rules going forward.
I
Interviewer2:57
So tell me how you're doing that specifically. How are you changing things to prevent this kind of thing from being posted?
J
Jack Dorsey3:03
One of the things that we had some folks from the New York Times come in last week, and we've been considering a policy around dehumanizing speech for some time. Dehumanizing speech is speech whose intent is to remove the human essence from someone. There's a lot of research out there stating that when that happens, it's more likely to lead to degrading actions or more harassment or even potentially physical harm. So we need to take that into consideration. We need to not just write it for ourselves with our own understanding but also get feedback from a broader community, and that's what we're committed to doing.
I
Interviewer3:44
You read your own Twitter feed. A lot of people are sounding off about this against you. What's it like for you to read some of the things that have been written?
J
Jack Dorsey3:55
It's hard. When we started the service, we didn't have a sense of all the real-world outcomes that people had. We started with a real focus on one core fundamental human right of freedom of expression. But over time, we have realized that that right has been weaponized, that it has been used to silence the voices of others. We cannot protect the freedom of expression for someone on our platform without also making sure that people feel safe to express themselves clearly and without endangerment of behaviors that happen online or offline.
I
Interviewer4:39
So can you do all that? I mean realistically, the experience that you've been in from not only instances of hate speech but the Russian bots... Have you to some extent lost control of this conversation?
J
Jack Dorsey4:50
I think Twitter, for our size, we're a very small company and we have had outsized impact. A lot of that impact has been quite positive. We've seen examples all over the world of positive outcomes that really move the world forward in significant ways. And we've also seen a lot of cost, a lot of negativity. We've seen harm come to people. We've seen people have to put up with a lot of harassment, a lot of abuse. We don't believe that is fair, and we don't believe that is right. We do sometimes feel like we're behind the circumstances that are pushing us, but that just puts a further emphasis on why we need to prioritize what matters most and where we need to change, whether it be policy, our rules, or the product itself. And really looking at the incentives that our product is telling people to do, looking deeply at some of the fundamentals that we may not have looked at in 12 years.
I
Interviewer5:54
You recently suggested that you put the onus on journalists to police some of the misinformation that's put out there. Is that fair? It's your platform where these things are finding their energy.
J
Jack Dorsey6:10
No, I don't believe it's completely fair. I went a little bit too far in that. Journalists have always been one of the most important constituencies on Twitter. We've had the benefit of having them work out in the open, use our service to source information, use our service to tell a story, use our service to remove bias from their posts and from their articles. It's extremely important that we help not only give them tools but also protect their work and their ability to do that work. And we're trying to figure out what the best tools are, how we can help add opportunity for credibility, how we can help add ability for context, how we can remove echo chambers that reinforce bias so that people can see multiple perspectives within a conversation and make their own mind up based on that information.
I
Interviewer7:07
You talk about dehumanizing speech. But in terms of finding that, is that a human process? Is there an algorithm that's looking for these things?
J
Jack Dorsey7:16
It's both. Algorithms are not going to solve everything. We can't rely on AI solutions or machine learning or deep learning to solve all of our concerns. You put a ball on some of these tweets and I make my calls based on those. I think there's a relationship between what an algorithm can do, which it can achieve a look at massive scale of everything that's happening, it can take so much into consideration and then bubble up interestingness so that humans can actually use their own judgments around it.
I
Interviewer7:47
I want to go back to your peers who took this action against Alex Jones. Do you think they overreacted or do you think they might have been late to the game?
J
Jack Dorsey7:59
I don't know. I think some of the actions have been, in my own personal view, a little bit inconsistent. A timeout seems minor compared to the implications of someone suggesting a call to arms against a particular group, in this case the media.
I
Interviewer8:15
How do you respond to that?
J
Jack Dorsey8:19
I feel any suspension, whether it be a permanent one or a temporary one, makes someone think about their actions and their behaviors and changes behavior based on a timeout. I don't know. I'm speaking more broadly as to why we utilize this particular tool. We have found that it does have the potential to change impact and change behavior. So whether it works in this case to change some of those behaviors and change some of those actions, I don't know. But this is consistent with how we enforce.
I
Interviewer8:52
You were 29 years old when you were part of the founding of Twitter. Is this what you imagined? That you would be in a world where you'd be hosting a platform where this hate speech is often used, where the President of the United States is sending out policies as...?
J
Jack Dorsey9:11
Well, we originally built this for us, as most services are built. And then the people that use us taught us what it wanted to be. They taught us that it wanted to be a place where they could talk about what was happening in the world. And not everything happening in the world is positive. There's a lot of dark areas. And we do believe fundamentally that shining light on those dark areas, being able to see them, being able to acknowledge them, being able to have a conversation about them, being able to then address them through action is important. If we can't see these things, both the positive and the negative, how are we supposed to progress? How are we supposed to help people who might be acting out of fear? Fear of what technology is also bringing, fear of losing their voice, fear of losing their job, fear of being left behind. We want to take a broader view in terms of what our service can provide, and that ability to show some of the darkest places in the world, shine light on them, and try to disarm it and try to engage it in a way that gets us to a healthier public conversation where we can all participate and we can all debate and we don't fear our safety and we feel protected. That is our goal. But it's hard to imagine all that when you start anything. So all these things have to evolve in learning and understanding and consideration and empathy for everyone who's participating, including those who are operating in bad faith.
I
Interviewer10:55
Why are they doing that? Why are those actions manifesting? And why aren't they seeing how they are affecting others and hurting others? How do we help solve that issue through conversation?
J
Jack Dorsey11:12
What does it take to get thrown off of Twitter? Violating our rules. Obviously any content that is illegal, any action that is illegal, and we have a Terms of Service that anyone can reference and refer to. And if you're in violation of that, then we take action. Currently the majority of our system works on people reporting those violations. And we understand that that is not fair to the victims of attacks or harassment or abuse. We're trying to build technology so we can remove a lot of that burden of reporting a violation directly to us, so that people don't have to do that. But we have other tools that we provide people, like block, like mute, to shut some of those things off. But all these mechanical things, these button presses of reporting a tweet, a button press of a block, a button press of a mute, we realize is friction. It's work. And it's not necessarily fair to someone who finds themselves speaking out against something and might be attacked by others.
I
Interviewer12:23
There's so much offensive material out there. Do you have regrets about how you acted in terms of some of the Sandy Hook allegations that it was a hoax? Do you wish you had been there for the families, been able to protect them as not only as a company but as a human being?
J
Jack Dorsey12:42
I do. I do feel terrible at what the parents had to go through and the community had to go through, and especially if they were derived from speech and actions on our platform. And I think we have felt behind, and we have felt that we have moved too slow in a lot of our actions. Three years ago we prioritized health and safety as our number one in the company, and we're coming from 10 years of not doing that. So there is a lot of debt that we have to pay down. There is a lot of infrastructure that we have to change. There's a lot of policy that we have to look critically at and also take a global mindset to this, because we are not just a service that is serving the United States. We are a service that is serving the world, and there are different laws around the world and different considerations around the world. And we need to make sure that we are thinking globally but allowing for local tailoring and local action as well.
I
Interviewer13:49
Do you make exceptions for high-profile individuals in terms of your rules of service?
J
Jack Dorsey13:56
No. We hold every account to the same standard, to the same rules.
I
Interviewer14:00
The President of the United States yesterday called a woman 'Omarosa' that dog. Would that violate your Terms of Service?
J
Jack Dorsey14:08
We do have a clause within our Terms of Service around public interest and around news worthiness. We believe it's important for the world to hear directly from global leaders how they think and how they treat the people around them. We think that is an important conversation to have. We think it's an important understanding.
I
Interviewer14:29
You don't make a distinction? You don't make an exception? You don't make a distinction, however, you know, what were policy talking about taxes or tariffs versus calling a person a dog?
J
Jack Dorsey14:38
We make an understanding of who is actually saying that and whether they are a global leader or whether they are a public figure, and whether this is something that should be reported on and should be talked about.
I
Interviewer14:54
Do you make a distinction between threatening or abusive language versus a policy statement the president might issue?
J
Jack Dorsey15:01
In this particular case, we go towards the global leader cause of public interest in news worthiness, and we believe that it's important to see this conversation and also be able to have a conversation about it, because we believe it's important that we understand how our global leaders are thinking and how they treat people around them.
I
Interviewer15:23
Last time we chatted, you talked a lot about the health, general conversational health on Twitter. Given the experience of 2016 and given the fact that Russian bots were using your platform to spread disinformation and try to sow discord in this country, can you tell us what actions that you have taken, that Twitter has taken, to lessen the chances of that happening in this next election?
J
Jack Dorsey15:47
Election integrity is our first priority this year. So we've deployed a specific team that is comprised of policy, our legal folks, engineering, and product to make sure that we are adding more credibility to accounts. For instance, we labeled everyone who's participating in the election, every candidate. And we've also learned a lot from elections around the world. The Mexico elections were a good example of where we opened new portals for people to report anything that looks suspicious. We were monitoring hashtags that were trending and understanding if they were gamed to artificially amplify those within trends or within search.
I
Interviewer16:36
How are you doing it against the bots right now? Are you intercepting more of them?
J
Jack Dorsey16:42
We're making a lot of progress. We challenge about 10 million accounts every single week to determine if they are bots or if they're an individual.
I
Interviewer16:50
And are you able to determine which?
J
Jack Dorsey16:53
We do it through a simple CAPTCHA right now, but we're getting better and better at applying more advanced technology to understand this.
I
Interviewer16:58
Do you think they'll still be there in the next election, or just in fewer numbers?
J
Jack Dorsey17:01
I think there will always be a threat of people trying to distract and distort the conversation, especially around major events like elections. So we have to take this into consideration ongoing now, and we need to make sure that we are considering not just policy changes but also product changes to help alleviate some of these concerns.
N
Narrator17:23
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