Jonathan Zittrain Quotes

Twitter was created as an open platform, an open communications ecosystem, and I hope it can stay that way. You have to be really careful not to let money get in the way of that.

As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

In 2007, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would become a 'platform,' meaning that outside developers could start creating applications that would run inside the site. It worked.

Anytime Facebook wants to change how it might use all that data about you, in any way, across any service it has within the Facebook ecosystem, all it has to do is change one privacy policy, tell you about it, and that's that.

Often, the people who call the most for us to remove content are often the first to complain when it’s their content that falls on the wrong side of a policy.

I think Facebook has a lot of work to do to make sure people are seeing meaningful things and not garbage.

A tweet is fast. But everything about policy change is very slow. And a lot of us are impatient.

I'm heartened that, for the first time, we're seeing some of the Internet Service Providers and the social media sites taking action against the Islamic State. That's the kind of initiative that can very, very much augment on an industrial scale what the government is trying to do.

All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news. We must try to squeeze this without stepping on freedom of speech and of the press, but we must also help the reader.

I have every right to tweet.

What we will do is we'll say, 'Okay, you have your page, and if you're not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.' But that doesn't mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.

Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters aren't 'real' writers and, so, don't merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PEN's attention.

People's access to social media should not permanently be restricted.

In addition to all the good things it's done, the Internet has empowered an awful lot of people who would have been best off disempowered, including quite a few bloggers on both sides.

I don't actually, as a general policy, block any sort of cookies. I keep them all turned on, and that's because I'm willing to make the tradeoff that I let companies gather this information about me in return for a better experience.

Trying to explain the First Step Act in prison reform in a tweet or Facebook post is not easy.

By becoming the Twitter police we've volunteered to become the thought police: This seems indisputable, even uncontroversial.

I am not going to stand by as people like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg silence the voices of millions of conservatives.

The argument about the need to regulate the digital space has to be weighed against freedom of expression in our society, whether we are interacting in a virtual world or in the real world where we have the growth of so-called 'safe spaces.'

I do not want to give the state and the authorities the right to ban things on the Internet - no ifs.

We spend a lot of time looking at the things we like: Amazon, Google, Facebook.

We can't edit people's content. We have to give them a platform to express themselves, and if they say something that the government doesn't like, we can't go delete it. We can't give the guy's IP address to the government.

The policy of the future cannot forever be determined by the politics of the past - or even the present.

Companies like YouTube will continue to be tested on their commitment to the mission that made them such popular and profitable websites - providing an open platform to a wide range of ideas from around the world.