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Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company
by roughly 4y ago
Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter's product - that kind of unique direct experience and learned wisdom is not easily replaceable.
- loceng 4y agoYou're forgetting he has access to teams of competent lawyers (and their networks) who will already have to interact with international law for Tesla et al.
- Kye 4y agoThere's a reason lawyers specialize. No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade. The next most qualified person is probably Facebook's general counsel since they deal with all the same problems, and the places they differ probably still benefit from the portable experience. After that, there aren't a lot of people leading work on speech policy at this scale. You can't just drop in an IP lawyer or a real estate lawyer and hope for the best.
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoCome on. "fight for speech?" The only speech she fought for was for her ideological-religion. Free, open, and fair debate were never permitted on twitter. She flat out ensured that their opinion became your opinion or you were out, one way or the other.
- loceng 4y ago"No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade." That's putting forward a ton of assumptions, none of which you cited supporting evidence for; length of time is quite a weak-shallow argument point. Let's also bring up the fact that maybe they stayed in those positions so long because they were willing to take a knee to the fascists in governments, willingly toeing the line for them - so then therefore lacking principles and integrity - which is an unacceptable foundation to be fighting from for anything. Quite the straw man argument you end with.
- disillusioned 4y agoYes, but he presumes her "overly woke" perspectives towards community and censorship were anathema to his approach to libertarian free speech and also resulted in deplatforming Trump so away she goes! Why do you need someone in charge of legal and policy if you're going to stop caring about those things wholesale?
- nomel 4y ago> but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments In charge of, but almost certainly not the DRI, or related talent, for any of that. Her direct experience is most certainly minimal, compared to the people actually doing that work. This assumes there's not significant corruption of course. So the questions would be, will Elon see the value in those groups responsible, and will those groups stick around on their own? I imagine so.
- roughly 4y agoI can tell you emphatically that Vijaya indeed had a lot of day-to-day exposure to and involvement with policy, having seen her in action directly.
- nomel 4y agoI’m sure there was exposure and involvement, but I would find it incredibly hard to believe if the brute force of the work was not a group of lawyers, with that exposure and involvement being easily exchanged for another, or even more hands off, CEO.
- nomel 4y agoOr to put it another way, if a tech CEO is the lead for crafting foreign policy, something is very very wrong with the org.
- roughly 4y agoSo, Vijaya wasn’t the CEO. She was general council and head of policy. Here’s her Wikipedia page, if you’d like to brush up on any other basic demographic details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijaya_Gadde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijaya_Gadde
- nomel 4y agoOh jeeze, I had the wrong person in my head. My bad.
- r721 4y agoMike Masnick's post on this topic: >Elon Musk’s First Move Is To Fire The Person Most Responsible For Twitter’s Strong Free Speech Stance https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/28/elon-musks-first-move-is-to-fire-the-person-most-responsible-for-twitters-strong-free-speech-stance/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/28/elon-musks-first-move-is...
- nemo44x 4y agoWow, talk about double-speak.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago"Limiting Speech is Actually Free Speech" This reads like a BuzzFeed article after the author finished squeezing their own head in a vice.
- pj_mukh 4y agoAFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya. I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?) [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-free-speech-twitter-global-censorship/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-free-speech-twitter-gl... EDIT: Citation added upon request.
- jamesrom 4y ago> AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands citation needed
- seattle_spring 4y agoI mean... Broadly gestures at Musk's string of behaviors over the last 20 years
- pj_mukh 4y agocitation added.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago"Authoritarian government" is a redundant statement in 2022.
- madeofpalk 4y ago> while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online) Like the Texas social media law that twitter is fighting (though industry lobby groups) in the supreme court? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/courts-decision-upholding-disastrous-texas-social-media-law-puts-state-rather https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/courts-decision-uphold...
- sawyna 4y agoYou are spot on. That style of working or perspective towards policy is exactly what Musk wants to remove at the grassroots level. Agreed that this wisdom and experience is not replaceable. But Musk intends to replace it with something else. If you think about it, Vijaya's perspectives and intuition is only going to pull back Musk's vision however vague that might be. Musk doesn't want to sit around and convince Vijaya of his opinion towards content moderation. I think if Vijaya showed appreciation or interest towards Musk's policy on some level at least, she would have had a non-zero chance to be around. The difference of opinion is at a stark contrast in my opinion. This is the fastest and brutal way of Musk moving forward with his plan.
- madeofpalk 4y ago> plan Plan? You say "i don't what his plan is", and then "this was a mastermind move for him to execute his plan".
- StanislavPetrov 4y agoI don't think you have to claim to know what his plan is, to know what it is not. Why would he pay $50 billion dollars to buy Twitter only to leave the same people in charge of what he thinks was a broken platform?
- Swenrekcah 4y agoI agree with that assessment. It’s good to keep in mind though that he at some point realised that whatever his plan might be, it wasn’t worth a $50B price. But by then he couldn’t back out. Perhaps he’s got a better plan now, perhaps not.
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoCreating a filter to destroy dissenting opinion and voices is not wisdom. It is pure evil and has no place in modern civilization.
- 6nf 4y agoElon purchased Twitter to fire Vijaya.
- spiderice 4y agoJust watching Tim Poole throw hard questions at her and her dodging for two hours on Rogan is enough to make me understand why Musk would fire her. She doesn’t share Musks vision at all when it comes to censorship.