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Jack Dorsey has had a busy 24 hours.
The CEO of both Twitter TWTR, -0.91% and Square SQ, +1.18% got candid about rival Facebook FB, +0.83% , his own shortcomings and President Donald Trump’s tweets during a Twitter News Summit in New York on Thursday — on the same day that Square announced it’s bringing free stock trading to its Cash app.
BuzzFeed’s editor in chief, Ben Smith, who interviewed Dorsey at the media panel, asked whether Twitter would ever join Libra — the cryptocurrency project that Mark Zuckerberg was grilled about on Capitol Hill this week.
“No,” he said. “Hell no.”
In fact, Dorsey — who said on a podcast earlier this year that he was spending $10,000 a week on bitcoin on the Cash app — implied that Libra isn’t a real cryptocurrency.
“Nothing within Libra had to be a cryptocurrency to do what they want to do,” he said. “They use that label liberally. It’s completely incorrect. I don’t know if it’s a gimmick, but cryptocurrency wasn’t necessary to make that thing work.”
The House Financial Services Committee has also exhibited skepticism toward Libra, while Visa VISA, +1.96% , MasterCard MA, +0.86% , PayPal PYPL, +1.49% and eBay EBAY, +0.35% have abandoned the project.
Read more: Facebook’s Zuckerberg faces Capitol Hill heat on Libra, elections fraud
Dorsey was also asked about Zuckerberg’s recent Georgetown University speech, in which the Facebook CEO said he, in the name of free speech, would allow political ads on the Facebook platform without fact checking them.
”We talk a lot about speech and expression, and we don’t talk about reach enough, and we don’t talk about amplification. And reach and amplification was not represented in that speech,” said Dorsey, calling that “a major gap and flaw in the substance he was getting across.”
As for Zuckerberg trying to say Facebook was founded as a reaction to the Iraq war, Dorsey added, “There’s some amount of revisionist history in all his story telling. It takes away from the authenticity and the genuineness of what we’re trying to do.”
Of course, Twitter has shouldered plenty of its own criticism for not better addressing harassment and hate speech on its own feeds, including complaints that President Trump’s frequently inflammatory tweets violate Twitter’s terms of use.
“I do appreciate the concept of a more direct, real-time democracy. This box is fully open. We’re not going away from it,” he said. “Over the long term, I think there’s a lot to learn from this. Over the short term, we’re challenged.”
He also discussed the challenges that journalists are facing today, noting that there’s not been “one screw-up” but many.
“The role of amazing newsrooms is calling out where there were errors and bias. It felt so strong and credible and noble. I feel like we’ve lost some of that maybe. The self-critical nature,” he said. “I believe we [Twitter] need to do a whole lot more of it, as well.”
