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The Many Misdemeanors Of Gadde

Hasmitha Surapaneni

As Elon Musk completed the takeover of Twitter on 28 October 2022 he immediately fired the top executives Parag Agarwal (CEO), Ned Segal (CFO) and Vijaya Gadde (Legal head).

Two among the three fired executives, Parag and Vijaya happen to be of Indian origin. Most related tweets seem to focus on Twitter’s now ex top legal expert and lawyer, Vijaya Gadde who has worked at Twitter since 2011.

Gadde was the key executive charged with overseeing Twitter’s trust and safety, legal and public policy functions. She was instrumental in making some controversial content restriction and censorship based decisions during her time at Twitter.

She had courted controversy both in the U.S and India by appearing to take decisions more aligned with the left-liberal side. She was seen internally as Twitter’s “moral authority” and the executive tasked with handling sensitive issues like harassment and dangerous speech.

She has shepherded Twitter through some of its most contentious political battles, including the decisions to remove all political advertising and to ban former U.S President Donald Trump, from the platform in the wake of the 6 January 2021 mob attack on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C, in which Trump’s Republican party supporters allegedly tried to overturn the 2020 U.S presidential results favoring the opposition Democratic party – a position that has earned her fans as well as, a large contingent of right-wing critics on Twitter.

She had convinced then-CEO Jack Dorsey not to sell political advertisements during the 2020 United States presidential election. She has spoken in defence of the decision by stating, “It wasn’t about anything other than, ‘This is the right thing to do for us as a company.’”

In India too, she had courted bad press and came under fire, when she appeared to appease the Indian left-liberal lobby.

In 2018, Gadde joined the then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, for meetings in India where they talked with several Dalit activists about their experiences on Twitter.

After the meeting, the activists gave Dorsey a sign that read “Smash Brahminical Patriarchy,” which he was later photographed holding. The photograph attracted controversy, with some critics calling the sentiment discriminatory against Brahmins while others deemed it an appropriate response to caste- and gender-based oppression in India. She appeared to have spent time and was photographed with a group of left-liberal women including the journalist, Burkha Dutt and the offensive poster’s designer, Thenmozhi Soundararajan.

In November 2018, Anna MM Veticad, a Christian, had tweeted: “During Twitter CEO @jack’s visit here, he & Twitter’s Legal head @vijaya took part in a round table with some of us women journalists, activists, writers & @TwitterIndia’s @amritat to discuss the Twitter experience in India. A very insightful, no-words-minced conversation.”

In response to the above tweet from Anna, Rajiv Malhotra of The Infinity Foundation, a Hindu Advocacy group, replied thus.

Vijaya Gadde responded to the social media furore in India, with an apology in a series of tweets, “I’m very sorry for this. It’s not reflective of our views. We took a private photo with a gift just given to us – we should have been more thoughtful. Twitter strives to be an impartial platform for all. We failed to do that here & we must do better to serve our customers in India.”

 

Another questionably controversial censorship decision that has come back to bite her, is one where she decided to block certain content and temporarily suspend the Twitter handle of the U.S based newspaper, The New York Post, when the paper tweeted news regarding current U.S President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, during the time of the 2020 U.S Presidential elections. Critics claimed, the move was biased in favour of Left Liberals.

The new owner of Twitter Elon Musk, does not agree with Vijaya’s views on content restriction and censorship. He has called for Twitter to truly embrace free speech and has advocated for open-sourcing Twitter’s algorithm and removing all spam bots from the platform. Most significantly, Musk has signaled he supports vastly loosening the company’s content moderation policies, suggesting it should only remove content if it is required by law. That would be a huge shift for the company, which has spent years under Vijaya’s guidance, creating elaborate guidelines to reduce the amount of vitriolic and threatening content on its platform.

On the subject of the free speech-freedom of expression debate, Gadde herself had advocated strongly for ensuring that Twitter’s policies protect its most vulnerable users while protecting free expression — a position that is starkly at odds with Musk’s.

In 2015, Gadde had written an op-ed for the Washington Post, a paper with a Left-Liberal bias. She wrote “I’m often inspired by the vigorous debates on controversial issues that occur on Twitter, but I’ve also been seriously troubled by the plight of some of our users who are completely overwhelmed by those who are trying to silence healthy discourse in the name of free expression,.”

In the article, Gadde continues “At times, this takes the form of hateful speech in tweets directed at women or minority groups; at others, it takes the form of threats aimed to intimidate those who take a stand on issues.”

Earlier this year, Elon Musk had said that he would reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump that Gadde has previously imposed, although the former US president had said he won’t return to the platform. He has instead launched his own social media app called Truth Social.

Soon after the takeover, Musk made his stand clear about free speech and minimal censorship (in contrast to extensive censorship under Vijaya’s legal stewardship), by tweeting with U.S Conservatives and right wing commentators, Mike Cernovich and Saagar Enjeti (an Indian American).

On Tuesday, Musk responded to a tweet by Saagar Enjeti, the popular Indian American conservative podcast host, who shared a “Politico” story about Vijaya Gadde. She had apparently broken down in tears during a company meeting discussing Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

Musk said that suspending the Twitter account of a major news organisation for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.

Musk agreed that Vijaya Gadde’s decision to limit the spread of the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden laptop back in 2020, over concerns that it may have been based on hacked material, was wrong. The laptop once belonging to Joe Biden’s son

The New York Post in November 2020 had published a story claiming that material found on a laptop once belonging to President Joe Biden’s son, supposedly contained salacious material about his personal life and business dealings.The laptop was later authenticated by other news organizations, though at the time, there were concerns about the authenticity and origin of the information.

As for India, Twitter’s new user-rules re: freedom of expression, may have a significant impact as Twitter has 2.36 crore users in India, making it the 3rd largest Twitter user base, after the U.S and Japan.

According to a recent official review, the Indian Government’s legal demands/orders for content blocking and takedowns issued to Twitter, comprise just 7 percent of the cumulative legal demands received by the microblogging platform in from 2012 to 2021, and are “proportional” to the expanding user base of the San Francisco-based company in the country.

This latest analysis comes even as Twitter and the Central Government are engaged in a faceoff over the increase in the number of official demands for takedowns and account blocks. Earlier this month, the social media platform had approached the Karnataka High Court challenging at least 39 such blocking orders issued by the union IT ministry.

Netizens are passionately speculating the future of Twitter. For now, Mr. Musk appears to be serious about his intention to promote free speech and minimal regulation of all human thought – social, political and everything in between. While left leaning “activists” in the US, India and elsewhere are crying foul and shedding tears for Vijaya Gadde, the Conservatives and right wing in many nations including the U.S and India, seem to be hailing the news.

The rabid leftist Dravidian Stockist online news portal, The News Minute, was quick to conjecture with the following title “Indian right wing happy as Elon Musk sacks Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde” just shows how deranged they are with Musk sacking her.

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