Dorsey: Twitter Guidelines Are Effectively Indecipherable

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was refreshingly candid this week about the difficulty of deciphering his social media site's rules or terms of service, a common complaint about various online sites and services, to be fair.

That came in a House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday (Sept. 5) on the power of, and problems with edge giants.

Related: Dorsey Says Twitter Does Not Make Decisions Based on Politics

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), former chairman of the committee, asked whether Twitter's rules were clear about what conduct and content were allowed on the site, Dorsey did not dance around the answer.

"I believe if you were to go to our rules today and sit down with a cup of coffee [suggesting it could take a while], you would not be able to understand them."

He said the company needed to do a much better job both with those rules and its terms of service. "We have to make them a whole lot more approachable."

He said Twitter was working on that, but went further to say there was a "whole lot of confusion" about not only the rules but how Twitter was enforcing them.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.