Jack Dorsey says Twitter is not responsible for Trump's election, but it's 'complicated'

President-elect Donald Trump is adept at using Twitter to communicate with his audience, but the platform is not responsible for his election, CEO Jack Dorsey has said.

"America's responsible for Donald Trump being president," he said at the Code Commerce conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Elections have always been big on Twitter and this one was especially important for the company, he said. Trump has well understood how to use Twitter for some time, said Dorsey.

"Having the President-elect on our service using it as a direct line of communication allows everyone to see what is on his mind in the moment," he said.

"We're definitely entering a new world where everything is on the surface and we can all see that in real time and we can have conversations about it," he said.

"It's definitely been fascinating to learn from." 

When asked directly how he feels about this, Dorsey said "it's complicated."

Though he feels very proud the role Twitter plays, all that it stands for and the spotlight it earned through the election, the implications of having a real-time feed of Trump's thought processes are not yet 

Henry Dombey | Vox Media

President-elect Donald Trump is adept at using Twitter to communicate with his audience, but the platform is not responsible for his election, CEO Jack Dorsey has said.

"America's responsible for Donald Trump being president," he said at the Code Commerce conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Elections have always been big on Twitter and this one was especially important for the company, he said. Trump has well understood how to use Twitter for some time, said Dorsey.

"Having the President-elect on our service using it as a direct line of communication allows everyone to see what is on his mind in the moment," he said.

"We're definitely entering a new world where everything is on the surface and we can all see that in real time and we can have conversations about it," he said.

"It's definitely been fascinating to learn from." 

When asked directly how he feels about this, Dorsey said "it's complicated."

Though he feels very proud the role Twitter plays, all that it stands for and the spotlight it earned through the election, the implications of having a real-time feed of Trump's thought processes are not yet understood, he said.Twitter's important role in disseminating news and opinion is also an area of conflict for Dorsey. 

"We have a role and responsibility to make sure that people are seeing what they need to see and they can have easy conversations and really get to the truth and that's complicated," he said.

The company is learning as quickly as it can how to handle these issues, he said.

Regardless of the election's outcome, it showed just how divided the country is right now, said Dorsey, who is originally from Missouri and is also the CEO of payments firm Square.

"We need to spend more time thinking about what problems we actually want to solve and how we're going to solve them," he said.

Square has an office of almost 250 people in St. Louis, MO now and on a recent visit asked staff members – many of them on the operations and support side of the company – who would be interested in computer programming training.

"Every single person put their hand up and said I want to learn how to code," he said. "We are doing it – we have started that program and that makes me really proud."