Was Parag Agrawal the Right Choice to Run Twitter?
The company’s new CEO stumbles into the speech wars
Moments after he was named CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal tweeted his email address. It was either a hilarious blunder or a bold note of transparency, depending on how you view it. But seeing paraga@twitter.com show up in a screenshot of his first email — which he posted for all to see — indicated Twitter’s new leader wasn’t exactly going to start carefully.
A lack of caution was evident in Agrawal’s first day on the job, especially as he stumbled into the speech wars. As CEO of Twitter, handling speech policy is one of your core responsibilities. You must provide your users enough room to speak while managing to keep them safe enough to exercise that right. Deciding where to draw the line on speech is one of the toughest jobs in tech, subject to campaigns from groups who’d like you to place it just to their liking. It’s frustrating and thankless, yet an essential duty. Agrawal must’ve anticipated this. Yet so far, instead of assuring the public that he’s on top of it, he’s stumbled.
It took less than 24 hours. On Tuesday morning, one day into Agrawal’s tenure, Twitter announced it would remove images and videos that portray private individuals. Simply showing up in a photo or video, by the letter of the policy, would be…
