Last month, Donald Trump leapt headlong into the raging debate over social-media platforms’ treatment of conservative users. “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once!” he tweeted. His outburst ostensibly came in response to a Vice News article, which falsely claimed that Twitter shadow bans conservatives, i.e. covertly restricts the reach of their posts. Twitter insisted it does no such thing—in actuality, the company’s process for dealing with polarizing users is much less about suppressing viewpoints than it is about minimizing the damage caused by distorted facts—but in a post-fact world, truth only goes so far. And on Saturday morning, Trump again stoked the social-media-censorship outrage machine, tweeting, “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won't let that happen.”

A not insignificant portion of the country, it seems, believes as Trump does: that social-media platforms are stacked against them. When Alex Jones’s Twitter account was temporarily frozen last week, his supporters immediately blamed liberal bias—blame Jack Dorsey insisted to CNN is misplaced. “Are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? We are not. Period,” he said in an interview with Brian Stelter. “We do not look at content with regard to political viewpoint or ideology. We look at behavior.” Yet in almost the same breath, Dorsey acknowledged that not everyone would believe him, and said Twitter would work to quash any doubt by increasing its self-awareness. “I think we need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is left, is more left-leaning,” he said. “We need to remove all bias from how we act and our policies and our enforcement and our tools.”

It was, perhaps, inevitable that right-wing groups would ignore the former remark, and seize on the latter. Within hours of the publication of Dorsey’s interview, conservative figureheads had framed his comments as tantamount to an admission that Twitter’s policies were biased. “Imagine my shock,” tweeted campus-carry activist Kaitlin Bennett, while Breitbart News led with Dorsey’s “left-leaning” line in a story that cited erroneous reports of conservatives and libertarians being “excluded” from Twitter’s suggested search results. When Stelter attempted to clarify, he was shouted down.

Dorsey has spent much of the summer attempting to head off this type of criticism. In June, the Twitter C.E.O. dined at the upscale Georgetown restaurant Cafe Milano with a group that included White House communications adviser Mercedes Schlapp and Fox News commentator Guy Benson, in what quickly devolved into an airing of grievances. His most recent media tour began on Sean Hannity’s radio show, where he sought to reassure listeners that Twitter would not “shadow ban” them. Conservatives praised his transparency, and Hannity himself has since claimed to have a direct line of communication with Dorsey. But Dorsey should have known his time in the right-wing sun would be short-lived; the likes of Hannity and Jones have proven over and over again that they will never let up on the social-media giant, even when Twitter appears to skew explicitly in their favor. In admitting to “left-leaning” bias, and promising to stamp it out when enforcing rules, Dorsey effectively handed conservatives more ammunition, perpetuating the cycle that forces him to continually tiptoe around the right.

In the remainder of his interview, Dorsey more or less stuck to familiar talking points, speaking to the fact that “more and more people have fear of companies like ours,” and the “perceived power [they] have over how [people] live, and even think, every single day.” He professed to want to fix Twitter’s toxicity problem, but maintained Twitter is a “small company” in comparison to other tech platforms, and doesn’t have unlimited resources to police its site. In other words, he appeared to walk a noncommittal line, wary of overpromising. But even such a cautious stance was useless in the face of the hyper-polarizing forces that Dorsey himself has helped to unleash.