Twitter CEO to Hannity: We do not ‘shadowban’ conservatives

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Sean Hannity on Wednesday that his platform does not “shadowban” conservatives.

“We do not shadowban according to political ideology or viewpoint or content, period,” Dorsey said during a rare interview on Hannity’s conservative radio show.

The company has been the subject of criticism from the right in recent weeks after some high-profile Republicans complained that their reach on the platform had been diminished. Twitter has said repeatedly that this was the result of changes to their algorithm meant to down-rank users who engage in certain behaviors and that Democrats were mistakenly affected as well.

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On Wednesday, Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter needs to do a better job of explaining the decisions it makes and the reasoning behind them.

“We’re trying to approach this with a very simple principle: How do we earn more trust?” Dorsey said. “We haven’t done a great job of communicating our principles.”

The company has also come under fire for being one of the only major tech platforms not to crack down on the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Pages for Jones and his radio show InfoWars have been booted from sites including Spotify, Apple and Facebook.

But Jones remains on Twitter despite his claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and that the 9/11 terror attacks were perpetrated by the government. Dorsey explained on Twitter this week that Jones “hasn’t violated our rules.”

On Wednesday, he said that his company is trying to balance free speech with the need to protect its users from abuse and hate speech.

“There’s a lot of nuance in everything that we’re facing,” he said. “We’re getting better and better, step by step.”