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Just what,Risa Sakamoto Archives exactly, did they expect?

On Tuesday, TED Talk hosted a conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey regarding "concerns and opportunities for Twitter's future" and invited those following along at home to participate. Specifically, TED Talk organizers asked people to tweet questions using the hashtag #AskJackAtTED and promised that some of those questions would be projected onto a giant screen behind the CEO during the event.

This being Twitter, the trolls — both sincere and otherwise — quickly pounced, long before the social-media mavens at TED Talk ended the ill-conceived experiment.

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While the stream of the talk has, at the time of this writing, yet to be published, photos from the event give us a pretty good idea as to the types of tweets that ended up displayed behind the CEO's head.

A photo shared by TED Talks' Twitter account, shortly after it tweeted a line from Dorsey saying the company's "second goal is incentivizing healthy conversation," set the tone.

"Now that your platform has played a significant role in the end of humankind, what’s your next step?…" read the cutting question.

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"You just said your metrics create toxicity," read another Tweet displayed behind Dorsey. "So… you’re CEO. Why not change them right now?"

These were far from the only tweets projected on stage that commented on Twitter's problems with toxic content.

"How do you feel about giving a platform to literal Nazis," asked another.

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At some point, the TED Talks team pulled down the stream of tweets. And while viewers speculated it did so in reaction to Dorsey getting publicly pwned, Whitney Pennington Rodgers, the TED Talks current affairs curator, assured us that they had always planned to end the stream mid-talk.

"The #askjackatted screen was planned to be up for a portion of the session for Chris and me to pull questions from, and was not intended to stay up the entire interview," wrote Rodgers.

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Though the stream was eventually pulled down, one Twitter user managed to slide in a hard-hitting question just in time: "Jack, who is Bam Bam," asked the (now apparently deleted) tweet.

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We're still waiting for our answer, Jack. In the meantime, however, could you please do something about the Nazis?

UPDATE: April 16, 2019, 11:55 a.m. PDT: This post has been updated to note that, according to TED Talk, organizers always planned to pull the stream of Twitter-sourced questions down mid-talk.

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