Meet the New Twitter Boss, Same as the Old Twitter Boss?

J ack Dorsey is stepping down from his position as CEO of Twitter, which he co-founded with three partners in 2006. The beleaguered Silicon Valley billionaire, a controversial figure among progressives and conservatives alike, released a vague statement on Monday explaining that “now is the right time” for “this company to break away from its founding and founders.” Strikingly, Dorsey neglected to offer any further details as to why he was resigning. But given the increasingly forceful criticism that Twitter’s content-moderation practices have invited from both sides of the ideological aisle — too heavy-handed for the Right, not heavy-handed enough for the Left — it’s not unreasonable to suspect that political pressures were a factor in the departure of the 45-year-old tech entrepreneur from the company that he helped build.

Dorsey assured that his confidence in his successor, Parag Agrawal, is “bone-deep.” Agrawal is a 37-year-old Indian-American immigrant who received his bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford. He previously served as Twitter’s chief technology officer. All of this amounts to an impressive background, to be sure. But Agrawal is assuming the helm of Twitter in an uncertain moment for the platform — and there are serious questions about how he will navigate it. His predecessor was a bearded, cerebral amateur yogi with a mad-genius affect who maintained a sort of wistful attachment to the techno-libertarianism of an earlier Silicon Valley, even as powerful institutional forces continued to push his platform away from its founding vision. Agrawal, on the other hand, is less a visionary than a nerdy bureaucrat, originally hired by Twitter as a software engineer in 2011 and ascending through the company’s ranks over the course of the next decade.

What does that now mean for the cause of free speech on the platform? The emerging consensus among conservatives is that Agrawal will be worse than his predecessor was. Critics, including Republicans Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Josh Hawley (Missouri), as well as an account representing Republicans on the House Judiciary committee, have already raised serious concerns about his ideological hostility toward conservatives. They have pointed to a series of old tweets — most notably, Agrawal’s 2010 quotation of a line from The Daily Show quipping that “if they are not gonna make a distinction between Muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racist?” — and his donations to the ACLU as further proof of his biases.

On the specific question of content moderation and free speech, Agrawal’s comments during a November 2020 interview with MIT’s Technology Review have also raised concerns. When asked by the interviewer about the balance between “combating misinformation” and “protecting free speech as a core value,” Agrawal responded:

Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.

Still, the evidence thus far does not suggest that Agrawal is any more committed to hard-line leftism than Dorsey, who made headlines last year for donating $10 million to Ibram X. Kendi’s “Center for Antiracist Research” at Boston University. (A move that, to be fair, was likely driven more by a desire to curry favor with progressives than genuine political sympathy.) There’s a chance, then, that Agrawal is not quite the left-wing ideologue that some on the right worry he is.

That, of course, does not necessarily mean that his tenure as CEO of Twitter won’t be materially worse for free speech. “Agrawal isn’t one of the woke people,” says Zach Graves, the director of policy for the Lincoln Network, a Silicon Valley–based think tank and advocacy group focused on technology and governance. “But without Jack’s power as a founder and knowledge navigating the business side of things, I think it’s likely that he’s going to be a sort of tech nerd who will be overcome by a woke employee base and shareholder and media pressure to either keep the status quo or ramp up pressure” surrounding Internet censorship.

In other words, Agrawal’s influence on Twitter’s content-moderation policies will be defined by his capacity to stand up to left-wing political and institutional pressures. In this regard, his background — as a computer scientist and Twitter institutionalist, so to speak — is more worrying than any of his personal political statements. In contrast to Dorsey, Agrawal’s lack of “the gravitas of being a founder” puts the new CEO in a much weaker position “to move the board and move internal stakeholders,” Graves tells National Review.

Many saw Dorsey as the last thing holding Twitter back from going all-in on censorship and political activism. In the years leading up to his resignation, the tech entrepreneur looked more and more out of step with the authoritarian political energy of his company’s younger staffers. A relic of Silicon Valley’s dynamic entrepreneurial origins, Dorsey often seemed bewildered by the ideological forces that his company was helping to advance. His line on free-speech issues became increasingly sporadic and confused, often angering conservatives by acquiescing to progressive demands that Twitter crack down on “hate speech” and “misinformation.” But even as he succumbed to institutional pressures, he often seemed distinctly uncomfortable with the calls for censorship and de-platforming coming from inside and outside his company.

At times, that discomfort manifested in open anger — after Twitter’s now-infamous decision to prohibit users from sharing a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Dorsey tweeted that the move was “unacceptable.” It was a firsthand look into the Twitter founder’s alienation from the company that he helped create. After the Hunter Biden–laptop debacle, “Jack was mortified and angry,” wrote Mike Solana, vice president of the tech venture capital firm Founders Fund. “We saw for the first time strong evidence of a social machinery beneath him at Twitter with which he was clearly in conflict.”

That controversy also illuminated the sharp contrast between Twitter’s origins and its contemporary form. The social-media giant began with a “hard cyber-libertarian line on speech,” Graves tells NR. “Eventually, they ran into European hate-speech laws, all the activists screaming at them, woke employees yelling at them, and all the usual kinds of stuff that happens to social-media platforms headquartered in the Bay Area. But I think many still saw Jack and a few others there as sort of wanting to have some kind of spiritual return to that.”

Now, however, Jack is gone — and Agrawal, whatever his personal political beliefs, is not likely to govern Twitter with the same kind of creative vision. Antonio Garcia Martinez, a tech entrepreneur and former product manager for Facebook who was pushed out of Apple after the company’s diversity-and-inclusion bureaucracy objected to the contents of a book that he had written in 2016, knows a thing or two about the internal dynamics at tech companies — and how politics can take over. “One aspect of tech-company dynamics that is practically universally true is that founders have an internal influence that’s unique and non-transferable,” Martinez tells National Review, adding:

They speak with a visionary authority that no other employee, no matter how accomplished, can possibly have because of the nature of tech culture, founder mythos, etc. I don’t know Jack (though know people in his circle), and from all his statements he does seem to be relatively (though not radically) committed to what passes for even-handed free speech these days. Parag is a very distinguished engineer, but not a political type, so how able will he be to resist the internal political pressure? Not sure. I suspect the answer is not very much.

“He was an odd choice to begin with,” Martinez says. “Someone like the current head of product might have been a more natural choice.”

The full effects of Agrawal’s influence remain to be seen, but just 24 hours after he assumed the position of CEO, Twitter announced a sweeping new content ban on posting pictures of an individual without his or her consent — a policy that critics say will be enforced unevenly, and used as pretext for ratcheting up attacks on conservative or other users deemed somehow “controversial.” Although it is difficult to discern whether this decision was precipitated by the change in company leadership, Twitter is justifying the new policy by claiming it aims to prevent “emotional or physical harm” — an echo of the “safetyism” rationale that is often invoked by left-wing censors. Some of Agrawal’s previous comments suggest that he is not unsympathetic to this framework. “Our approach is rooted in trying to avoid specific harm that misleading information can cause,” he told the MIT Technology Review when asked about policing misinformation.

So is Agrawal a hard-left radical? It’s unlikely. But his implicit acceptance of the default technocratic progressivism that governs Silicon Valley is worrying. With Agrawal as CEO, “I kind of expect that Twitter’s institutional incentives will have a strong status quo direction bias,” Graves says. That’s the problem, though — for conservatives, the status quo is far from acceptable.