Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, testifying last week at a remote video Congressional hearing. View from Washington This event was planned by subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee. The session, which took place on March 25, 2021, focused on “Social Media’s Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation.” In response to a line of questioning during his testimony, Dorsey touted his long term ambitions of providing more privacy preserving, censorship resistant channels of communication.
Dorsey has for some time now pursued a vision of off-grid, user-owned communication. His goal is to give people the tools they need to speak freely without having to trust a centralized network. His support for Bitchat exemplifies this vision. Unlike other forms of communication, Bitchat uses ephemeral, encrypted communication to connect nearby devices, so messages stay private and secure. Notably, the application stores messages exclusively on-device to start, so they by default disappear and never touch centralized infrastructure.
In a post on X this week, Bitchat’s launchpad Dorsey called the platform his personal experiment. He touted its experimental spirit as a form of decentralized communication. He imagines adding to this platform in future iterations so that new updates can bring in WiFi Direct technology, increasing the speed and range. This further fits with his larger mission of decentralizing everything from social media to payments to, obviously, energy.
Dorsey’s advocacy for decentralized communication is further illustrated by his support for platforms such as Damus and Bluesky. These initiatives are completely peer-to-peer without accounts, usernames or data harvesting. They are very different from the services most people use today.
He stated, “bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things,” indicating the technological foundations that underpin his vision for improved communication systems.
Dorsey has long expressed an intention of fostering a decentralized ecosystem. Now he’s hoping to shake up the status quo of mainstream social media. By backing applications such as Bitchat, he reinforces his stance that users should have the autonomy to choose how they communicate online.