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WASHINGTON: Donald Trump went to battle using Twitter and won Washington. Donald Trump is now going to war against Twitter after losing Washington. Two Indian-Americans are at the heart of the company that on Friday permanently suspended @realDonaldTrump’s account citing the “risk of further incitement to violence,” following the terrorist attack on the US Capitol. It’s part of what is shaping up to be a larger conflict between Twitter and the fundamentalist Trump world, in fact a war between Big Tech, which has many high-ranking executives of Indian-origin, and extremism.
According to Trump and his supporters, it is “Big Tech” that has launched an extreme form of censorship against conservative, right-wing views. At Twitter, the policy is shaped by Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety issues, described as “the most powerful social media executive you’ve never heard of” by Politico. “You don’t know her face or name because she rules in the shadows,” one Trump supporter said. Another called her “Joseph Goebbels in a pants suit (sic).” Executing the policy at the technological end is Twitter’s CTO Parag Agrawal.
Trump supporters effort to decamp en masse to Twitter rival Parler, which allows unfiltered content under the guise of free speech, is also being checkmated by Big Tech. Twitter was joined in its fight to cap extremism by Google, headed by Sundar Pichai, which suspended Parler from its Play Store, saying, “We’re aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the US.”
Apple too gave Parler a 24-hour ultimatum to initiate a moderation plan to ban posts promoting extremist violence and illegal activity. Facebook too has begun culling extremist content, including banning Trump’s account till January 20. In another move, Google subsidiary You Tube terminated Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
The bans have enraged Trump and his supporters who tried to get around it by posting from alternate or proxy accounts. “As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” Trump raged in a tweet from his official @POTUS account, promising “our own platform in the near future” and adding, “Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH. They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely.” Twitter deleted the posts.
While liberals insist that Trump’s lies and mendacity has been well-chronicled and lawmakers in Washington moved to impeach him for incitement to insurrection, the defeated President’s surrogates painted a picture of runaway censorship by Big Tech. “So the ayatollah, and numerous other dictatorial regimes can have Twitter accounts with no issue despite threatening genocide to entire countries and killing homosexuals etc… but The President of the United States should be permanently suspended. Mao would be proud,” Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr tweeted, inviting derision for the comparison. Some Trump supporters drew up a watchlist of big tech execs, including Gadde and Agrawal.
Far from being in the shadows, the India-born Gadde has been a prominent face of Twitter, with CEO Jack Dorsey entrusting her with framing and executing policy. “Whenever somebody on Twitter takes issue with the network’s rules or content policies, they almost always resort to the same strategy: They send a tweet to @jack,” a recent Fortune profile noted. “But what users don’t know is that they’re imploring the wrong Twitter Inc. executive. While Dorsey is the company’s public face, and the final word on all things product and strategy, the taxing job of creating and enforcing Twitter’s rules don’t actually land on the CEO’s shoulders. Instead, that falls to Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde.”
“He rarely weighs in on an individual enforcement decision. I can’t even think of a time. I usually go to him and say, ‘this is what’s going to happen.’” Gadde, 45, told the magazine. She accompanied Dorsey during his meeting with Trump in the White House Oval Office and is also credited with not selling political ads on Twitter during the 2020 presidential election despite the financial losses it entailed.
Coming to the US as a three-year old, Gadde grew up on Beaumont, Texas, in a ruby red district replete with racism (nearby Vidor was known as one of the most hateful places in Texas where Black had to leave town before sundown). One of her formative experiences she has said is her out-of-work chemical-engineer father being told by his boss to get permission from a local Ku Klux Klan leader to go door to door collecting insurance premiums. In June 2020, Twitter turfed out KKK leader David Duke from the platform.
The racist ratpack is now training its guns on Gadde, accusing her of being “hostile to the United States,” and relishing her “power to silence,” people like Alex Jones, a conspiracy crackpot and a Trump loyalist who claims the White House asked him to lead the march to the Capitol that ended in mayhem.
According to Trump and his supporters, it is “Big Tech” that has launched an extreme form of censorship against conservative, right-wing views. At Twitter, the policy is shaped by Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety issues, described as “the most powerful social media executive you’ve never heard of” by Politico. “You don’t know her face or name because she rules in the shadows,” one Trump supporter said. Another called her “Joseph Goebbels in a pants suit (sic).” Executing the policy at the technological end is Twitter’s CTO Parag Agrawal.
Trump supporters effort to decamp en masse to Twitter rival Parler, which allows unfiltered content under the guise of free speech, is also being checkmated by Big Tech. Twitter was joined in its fight to cap extremism by Google, headed by Sundar Pichai, which suspended Parler from its Play Store, saying, “We’re aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the US.”
Apple too gave Parler a 24-hour ultimatum to initiate a moderation plan to ban posts promoting extremist violence and illegal activity. Facebook too has begun culling extremist content, including banning Trump’s account till January 20. In another move, Google subsidiary You Tube terminated Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
The bans have enraged Trump and his supporters who tried to get around it by posting from alternate or proxy accounts. “As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” Trump raged in a tweet from his official @POTUS account, promising “our own platform in the near future” and adding, “Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH. They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely.” Twitter deleted the posts.
While liberals insist that Trump’s lies and mendacity has been well-chronicled and lawmakers in Washington moved to impeach him for incitement to insurrection, the defeated President’s surrogates painted a picture of runaway censorship by Big Tech. “So the ayatollah, and numerous other dictatorial regimes can have Twitter accounts with no issue despite threatening genocide to entire countries and killing homosexuals etc… but The President of the United States should be permanently suspended. Mao would be proud,” Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr tweeted, inviting derision for the comparison. Some Trump supporters drew up a watchlist of big tech execs, including Gadde and Agrawal.
Far from being in the shadows, the India-born Gadde has been a prominent face of Twitter, with CEO Jack Dorsey entrusting her with framing and executing policy. “Whenever somebody on Twitter takes issue with the network’s rules or content policies, they almost always resort to the same strategy: They send a tweet to @jack,” a recent Fortune profile noted. “But what users don’t know is that they’re imploring the wrong Twitter Inc. executive. While Dorsey is the company’s public face, and the final word on all things product and strategy, the taxing job of creating and enforcing Twitter’s rules don’t actually land on the CEO’s shoulders. Instead, that falls to Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde.”
“He rarely weighs in on an individual enforcement decision. I can’t even think of a time. I usually go to him and say, ‘this is what’s going to happen.’” Gadde, 45, told the magazine. She accompanied Dorsey during his meeting with Trump in the White House Oval Office and is also credited with not selling political ads on Twitter during the 2020 presidential election despite the financial losses it entailed.
Coming to the US as a three-year old, Gadde grew up on Beaumont, Texas, in a ruby red district replete with racism (nearby Vidor was known as one of the most hateful places in Texas where Black had to leave town before sundown). One of her formative experiences she has said is her out-of-work chemical-engineer father being told by his boss to get permission from a local Ku Klux Klan leader to go door to door collecting insurance premiums. In June 2020, Twitter turfed out KKK leader David Duke from the platform.
The racist ratpack is now training its guns on Gadde, accusing her of being “hostile to the United States,” and relishing her “power to silence,” people like Alex Jones, a conspiracy crackpot and a Trump loyalist who claims the White House asked him to lead the march to the Capitol that ended in mayhem.
