Conservatives across Twitter have been celebrating as co-founder Jack Dorsey has stepped down as CEO. But before they cheer too loudly, they should take a look at his replacement, former CTO Parag Agrawal. His perspectives on the 1st Amendment are not exactly patriotic.
Former CTO and new Twitter CEO Agrawal in November 2020 interview: "Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment… focus[ing] less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed."
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 29, 2021
According to Jack Hadfield at National File:
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However, skeletons have already jumped out of Agrawal’s closet. In an interview from November 2020 with Technology Review, Agrawal, in his position as Twitter’s CTO, said in response to a question about combatting misinformation, that Twitter should not be “bound by the First Amendment,” and “focus less” on free speech:
“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. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.
“The scarce commodity today is attention. There’s a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”
Reactions have been mixed, mostly because conservatives generally dislike Dorsey and they are unfamiliar with Agrawal. But some are familiar with him and aren’t happy.
New Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal makes Dorsey look like a moderate.
Agrawal is left of Lenin.
We’re all on borrowed time.
— John – F**k Your Variant – Cardillo (@johncardillo) November 29, 2021
I see a lot of conservatives celebrating Jack Dorsey stepping down from Twitter.
His replacement, Parag Agrawal, is a far-left extremist who embraces Critical Race Theory and has aggressively spoken against the 1st Amendment.
This is not a time to celebrate.
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) November 29, 2021
There’s also a quote from him circulating that is actually a quote from The Daily Show. That doesn’t make the content of the Tweet less offensive, but it does give a little more context than what most are reporting.
"If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists."
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) October 26, 2010
Twitter has been an anti-American disaster under Jack Dorsey. But anyone who thinks things are going to get better under Parag Agrawal is either a radical leftist themselves or simply unaware of the incoming CEO’s perspectives.