On Monday, at WIRED's 25th anniversary summit, I spoke with Jack Dorsey about some of the biggest questions he confronts running Twitter and Square. How has his position on free speech evolved? Was it inevitable that Twitter would become a tool of international diplomacy? Can the company counter filter bubbles? Should individuals have complete control of their data? And does the internet need a native currency?

Dorsey answered all the questions thoroughly, and sometimes self-critically. Here’s the video of our talk, as well as the transcript:

Nicholas Thompson: I am delighted to get to interview Jack. One of the things about interviewing Jack is that you ask him questions and he does this thing where he listens …

Jack Dorsey: And then I don’t answer.

NT: You usually do answer them! You seem to listen, absorb, and answer. The only thing to do with somebody like that is to ask hard questions.

So I want to start with free speech. Which is one of the issues that would truly divide this room. There are a lot of people who believe that Twitter has abdicated the role that it used to play in defending free speech. You used to be known as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” which I know is a controversial quote, but the idea is that Twitter used to really stand for what may be the most important thing in the US Constitution. And then there are other people who argue that, actually, there are trade-offs between safety, privacy, and free speech. And that Twitter isn’t in the right place on the spectrum. And so I want to just start by asking you for your evolution on this issue, and where you are now on the tradeoffs.

JD: When we started the company, we weren’t thinking about this at all. We were thinking about building something that we wanted to use. And one of the most interesting things about Twitter has been this amazing experiment in creating with others. Everything that we’ve benefitted from—the @ symbol, the hashtag, the retweet, the thread—has been invented by the people using our service, not by us. And it’s been interesting to see what Twitter wants to be and how it manifests itself year after year after year.

Our purpose today, we believe, our superpower, is around conversation. And we believe our purpose is to serve the public conversation. And that does take a stance around freedom of expression and defending freedom of expression as a fundamental human right. Not just one within this country.

'Our purpose today, we believe, our superpower, is around conversation.'

But it also comes with a realization that freedom of expression may adversely impact other fundamental human rights, such as privacy and physical security. So we believe that we can only serve the public conversation, we can only stand for freedom of expression if people feel safe to express themselves in the first place. We can only do that if they feel that they are not being silenced. So the question we’re starting to ask is: What are the tools we’re building? What is our effect on making it easier to weaponize freedom of expression against someone so that they don’t even feel free to express themselves in the first place or ultimately they’re silenced, which would go against that goal of serving the public conversation?

NT: Is that a different position than you had two years ago? Or do you feel like it is the same position?

JD: Not from two years ago. I think Vijaya [Gadde]’s op-ed in the Washington Post captures our position—our most evolved position—the best. And that is around this balance of people feeling safe to express themselves. But certainly, this quote around “free-speech wing of the free-speech party” was never a mission of the company. It was never a descriptor of the company that we gave ourselves. It was a joke, because of how people found themselves in the spectrum.