Jack Dorsey will donate $1 million a year to Signal

Annoyed by the turn of events within Twitter since its takeover by Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey wants to support the “developing a more open Internet”. The Twitter co-founder said in a blog post that he plans to award grants to fund projects along these lines. Initially, the American entrepreneur, also at the origin of Block (ex-Square), wishes to support engineering teams working on social media, private communication protocols or bitcoin.

The first donation will go to Signal instant messaging, which will receive $1 million per year. Founded by Matthew Rosenfeld (aka Moxie Marlinspike), the app is all about security and offers options such as automatically destroying messages after a given period.

Almost two years ago, Signal had distinguished itself by taking full advantage of the setbacks of WhatsApp, when the Meta app wanted to impose on its users a modification of its general conditions which made it possible to transfer personal data with Facebook. Objective, to make WhatsApp an intermediary between Internet users and merchants. Recommended by Edward Snowden and Elon Musk, Signal had gained several million users in a few days.

The Three Principles of Jack Dorsey

This messaging therefore meets the three principles that online platforms should respect according to Jack Dorsey: “Social media must be resilient in the face of corporate and government control. Only the original author can remove content they produce. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.” In an exercise of introspection, the co-founder of Twitter believes that the microblogging site, both in its current version and when he ran it, “does not meet any of these principles”. “The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in creating tools to allow us to manage the public conversation, as opposed to creating tools that allow people using Twitter to manage it easily by themselves. -selves”he said in particular.

From now on, the social network belongs to Elon Musk, who wasted no time in upsetting its operation with radical decisions that aroused strong controversy. Barely became the owner, the boss of Tesla did not hesitate to lay off half of the workforce to lighten the finances of Twitter. More recently, he decided to dissolve the trust and security council which supported the social network in certain strategic decisions. This is a great departure from the ideals advocated by Jack Dorsey, who believes that social media should not be “ownership of a single company or a group of companies”.

Supporter of a more decentralized web, he proposes the concept of Web5, the perfect addition of Web2.0, known as “social”, as we know it today, and Web3, already fantasized by many. According to him, this new evolution of the web would consist of completely decentralized protocols and applications, within which the users of content and services would definitively own their identity and all of their data.