Jack Dorsey is leaving Twitter — and he says he has regrets about the social media giant he co-founded.
Recently, Dorsey wrote on Twitter that he feels guilty about the role Twitter has played in creating a centralized internet, where a small handful of companies and platforms claim an outsized proportion of users and their data. With 217 million daily users, Twitter certainly qualifies as one of those platforms, along with other tech giants like Meta, Alphabet and Amazon.
"I realize I'm partially to blame, and regret it," Dorsey wrote in his April 2 tweet.
The rueful admission comes amid Dorsey's attempts to extricate himself from Twitter: He stepped down as the company's CEO last year, and will leave its board of directors next month.
In his tweet, Dorsey referenced a few nostalgic elements from the early days of the internet, including online public bulletin board and discussion network Usenet, text-based chat platform Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and email encrypted with the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software program.
Dorsey called those types of features "amazing" and lamented that "centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet." Twitter is one example of internet centralization: It's a popular source of information and news at least partially because hundreds of millions of users already have accounts.
Similarly, Alphabet-owned Google captures more than 90% of the online search market, according to StatCounter. Research from eMarketer shows that roughly 64% of all digital ad spending going to Amazon, Facebook and Google.
