You may have heard on Dan Bongino’s show today that Jack Dorsey decided to release a mea culpa related to the Twitter Files. I read it and basically it is his opinions about how we need to fix social media going forward and that social media companies should stand up to corporate and government pressure when it comes to moderation.
An Activist Entered Our Stock
However, one thing that I noticed which I haven’t seen too many people talking about is the fact that Jack Dorsey specifically mentioned that things started going downhill after “an activist entered our stock”. 🤨🤔🙁 Sounds familiar, no? This seems to be the same thing hedge funds like Blackrock are doing to push corporations in the oil industry to give up on fossil fuels.
Is the Activist Investor Elliott Management?
I did a little more digging and found this little nugget from the Daily Mail:
“It is believed that Dorsey was referring to Elliott Management, the New York City-based hedge fund worth $55billion which bought up a majority of Twitter’s shares, filled the board with its own people, and then set about trying to fire Dorsey.”
Hey, what do you know? A hedge fund is involved… Crazy, right?
So, a multi billion dollar hedge fund decided to invest in Twitter, filled the Twitter board with their own people and suddenly Jack Dorsey decides to give up on implementing his principles? Specifically he points out principles of resilience against corporate and government control, inability to remove creators’ content and moderation tools in the hands of users rather than Twitter employees. Here are Jack’s “principles” in his words:
- Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
- Only the original author may remove content they produce.
- Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.
Elliott Management Pushing ESG
Then I did a little more digging and found the following info from The Deal:
“Elliott Management Corp., which is known for its high-profile and sometimes aggressive activist campaigns, is making sure that it considers environmental, social and governance factors in each of its investments, public or private.
‘Over the last few years since my role creation, and other steps that we’ve taken, I think we are more implicitly involving ESG into our practices,’ said Christine O’Brien, head of investment stewardship at Elliott…”
Final Thoughts
Now I am not going to completely give Jack Dorsey a pass on this. Especially because he could have had the courage to tell everyone this stuff back when it might have helped keep people’s voices from being silenced. However, it does seem as though ESG activist investors and their minions did play a role in the content suppression and deplatforming of American patriots and considering that they were actively working to push Dorsey out of the company, he may not have had much power to stop them.
Finally, as Dan Bongino pondered on his show today, I can’t help but wonder how many other social media companies are facing similar issues? How many corporate boards in social media and other tech companies have been infiltrated by ESG activists? Hopefully we’ll get some answers to these questions soon.
