Jack Dorsey leaves mixed legacy as CEO of Twitter

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who was the social platform's first CEO in 2007 until he was forced out the following year, then returned to the role in 2015, is once again out of the job — this time, he says, by choice.

In a letter posted on his Twitter account, Dorsey said he was "really sad...yet really happy" about leaving the company and that it was his decision. Dorsey offered no specific reasons for his resignation beyond an abstract argument that Twitter, where he's spent 16 years in various roles, should "break away from its founding and founders." Dependence on company founders, he wrote, is "severely limiting."

It's the end of six tumultuous years at the social platform, during which Twitter has been plagued with slow growth, weathered an investor revolt, grappled with accusations of failure to deal with problems of hate speech, harassment and other harmful activity and finally took the extraordinary step of banning a sitting U.S. president for creating a danger to public safety during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, said Dorsey leaves behind a mixed legacy.

"I think Twitter has obviously had a very big influence on American public affairs, in journalism, politics, to some degree culture. And a lot of that influence has been good," Barrett said. "But it also, it turns out, had a darker side and... has been exploited for years by people who want to harass other people and spread falsehoods about other individuals, about groups of individuals, about the state of democracy."

Dorsey defended the ban of former President Donald Trump, saying his tweets after the Capitol riot endangered public safety and created an "extraordinary and untenable circumstance" for the company. Trump sued Twitter, along with Facebook and YouTube, in July for alleged censorship.

Dorsey has faced several distractions as CEO, starting with the fact that he's also founder and CEO of the payments company Square. Some big investors have openly questioned whether he could effectively lead both companies.

Barrett believes founders of large companies, including other social media giants like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, should be giving up control of the day-to-day operations of their entities "sooner than they tend to do."

"I think there's a natural tendency to want to hold on to your baby and guided and shape it," Barrett said. "But it's a very different role coming up with the idea in the first place and refining it in its very earliest years and then running it when it becomes something that has hundreds of millions of users."

Twitter named its current chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal, as CEO effective Monday. Dorsey will remain on the board until his term expires in 2022.

Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011, has been CTO since 2017, and is far less well known than Dorsey.

He previously worked at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T in research roles. At Twitter, he's worked on machine learning, revenue and consumer engineering and helping with audience growth. An immigrant from India, Agrawal studied at Stanford and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

As CEO, he'll have to step out from his largely technical background and deal with the social and political issues Twitter and social media are struggling with, including misinformation, abuse, and effects on mental health. Not to mention efforts in Congress to regulate social platforms like Twitter to deal with the harms they are reported to cause, which could significantly impact their businesses.

"Twitter has sent signals out to the world that it realizes that it needs to do more as a company to police its platform to follow through on the promise that Dorsey set out to promote what he likes to call the conversation and specifically to promote the health of the conversation, making it constructive and open rather than destructive and malicious or misleading," Barrett said. "And I really think we need to give the new person a chance to explain for himself... what he intends to do."

IMAGE: AP