- Elon Musk bought Twitter Monday and could shift its approach to content moderation.
- One key architect of those content policies is lawyer Vijaya Gadde.
- Gadde cried during a meeting Monday discussing the acquisition, Politico reported Tuesday, citing “three people familiar with the meeting.”
Twitter’s top lawyer and a key voice in decisions such as banning President Donald Trump from the platform became emotional and cried in a meeting with employees discussing Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform on Monday, Politico reported Tuesday.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, is said to have played a large role in content moderation at Twitter, advising former CEO Jack Dorsey, and helping negotiate the deal between Musk and Twitter.
Gadde met virtually with employees she supervises in legal and policy on Monday to discuss the buy, Politico reported.
She “acknowledged that there are significant uncertainties about what the company will look like under Musk’s leadership,” the outlet wrote, citing “three people familiar with the meeting.”
The sources told Politico that Gadde cried while relaying concerns about changes to Twitter.
She also reportedly said she was proud of the employees and that they should continue to try and make a positive contribution to the company.
Former employees have said that they do not feel Musk’s ethos matches the company’s values (though Dorsey has embraced the buy).
“Any sense that an exodus is building is correct,” a former Twitter employee told Insider Tuesday.
Employees asked about everything from potential layoffs to the reactivation of Donald Trump’s Twitter account in an all-hands meeting on Monday, where CEO Parag Agrawal acknowledged there is not a ton of certainty about the platform’s future.
Musk has remained bullish on free speech, tweeting Tuesday that the platform shouldn’t moderate anything that is against the law.
Twitter’s policies extend far beyond that, penalizing certain content that spreads coronavirus-related misinformation as well as various types of hate speech.
The “free speech” concern is often cited by conservatives, who have celebrated Musk’s buy and long felt Twitter discriminates against right-wing views, especially after deplatforming Trump.
Gadde was a driver behind that decision, CNN Business reported in 2021, as did others at the time it occurred.
The lawyer’s job involves deciding when content can be taken down and has been referred to as Twitter’s “moral authority,” Politico reported.
“Vijaya is at the crossroads of some of the most important policy decisions the company is making and how it interacts with governments around the world,” Adam Bain, former Twitter COO who worked with Gadde before he left in 2016, told CNN Business.
Gadde also posed the idea to Dorsey of banning political advertising on Twitter altogether, (which happened in 2019) according to Politico Magazine.
The outlet profiled her at length in 2020, discussing how she became a lightning rod for conservative criticism and discussed her childhood as an immigrant from India in Beaumont, Texas. There, her father once was advised to seek the permission of the local Klu Klux Klan to sell insurance door to door, she said.
Experiences like this and others inspired her to become a lawyer, she said.
After her meeting Monday, Gadde appeared to have cheered up employees, some of whom tweeted about her afterwards, Politico reported.
“If you look up the word “inspiring” in the dictionary you find a picture of @vijaya,” public policy associate at Twitter Kennedy O’Brien Tweeted.
Twitter did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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