Jack Dorsey to give $1 mn per year to Signal app

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has reportedly said that he will give a grant of $1 million per year to encrypted messaging app Signal, the first in a series of grants he plans to make to support “open internet development”.  

As per Reuters, Dorsey wrote in a post on Revue — a newsletter service owned by Twitter — that social media should not be “owned by a single company or group of companies”, and needs to be "resilient to corporate and government influence”.  

Founded on 21 February 2018, by computer researcher Moxie Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, Signal, whose software is free and open-source, is a cross-platform centralised encrypted instant messaging service developed by the non-profit Signal Foundation and its subsidiary, the Signal Messenger.  

Its mission is “to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal’s mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous”. Users can send one-to-one and group messages, which can include files, voice notes, images and videos. 

Dorsey issued a warning on the social network’s state and prospects, saying it meets none of the standards he hoped to achieve and that harassment of its staff is shortsighted and dangerous. It’s time to move on, as he’s said before, and to that end he’s funding new efforts in “open internet development,” starting with $1 million per year to Signal. 

Starting in a Twitter thread but quickly transitioning to a blog post (“I don’t want to edit everything into 280 char chunks”), Dorsey said that his hope to build a Twitter according to his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an unnamed activist investor.  

“I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company,” he wrote.  

The principles he had hoped to build on — resilience to corporate and government control, user-controlled content with no exceptions and algorithmic moderation — are not present in today’s Twitter, nor in the one he led, he admitted. 

As of January 2021, the platform had approximately 40 million monthly active users. As of May 2021, it was downloaded more than 105 million times, as per reports.  

Notably, Elon Musk has also said that he spoke to Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike who is willing to help out Twitter with encrypting DMs.