The Woman Behind Twitter’s Decisions Cries As Musk Bought Company

Twitter’s top attor­ney and a key voice in deci­sions such as bar­ring 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.

Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, pol­i­cy and trust, is said to have played a large role in con­tent mod­er­a­tion at Twitter. She also advised for­mer CEO Jack Dorsey and helped nego­ti­ate the deal between Musk and Twitter.

On Monday, Gadde met vir­tu­al­ly with employ­ees she super­vis­es in legal and pol­i­cy 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 peo­ple told Politico that Gadde cried while relay­ing con­cerns about changes to Twitter.

They also told the out­let that she said she was proud of the employ­ees, and that they should con­tin­ue to try to make a pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion to the company.

Former employ­ees have said that they don’t 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 on Tuesday.

Employees asked about every­thing from poten­tial lay­offs to the reac­ti­va­tion of Trump’s Twitter account in an all-hands meet­ing on Monday, where CEO Parag Agrawal acknowl­edged that there was­n’t a ton of cer­tain­ty about the plat­for­m’s future.

Musk has remained bull­ish on free speech, tweet­ing on Tuesday that the plat­form should­n’t mod­er­ate any­thing that isn’t 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 cel­e­brat­edMusk’s buy and have long felt that Twitter dis­crim­i­nates against right-wing views, espe­cial­ly after it deplat­formed Trump.

Gadde was a dri­ver behind that deci­sion, CNN Business report­ed in 2021, as did oth­ers at the time it occurred.

The attor­ney’s job involves decid­ing when con­tent can be tak­en down, and she’s 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, Twitter’s for­mer 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, Politico Magazine reported.

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 was once advised to seek the per­mis­sion of the local Ku Klux Klan to sell insur­ance door-to-door, Gadde said.

Experiences like this and oth­ers inspired her to become a lawyer, she added.

After her meet­ing on Monday, Gadde appeared to have cheered up employ­ees, some of whom tweet­ed about her after­ward, Politico reported.

“If you look up the word ‘inspir­ing’ in the dic­tio­nary you find a pic­ture of @vijaya,” tweet­ed Kennedy O’Brien, a pub­lic pol­i­cy asso­ciate at Twitter.

Twitter did not respond imme­di­ate­ly to a request for comment.

Read the orig­i­nal arti­cle on Business Insider