Elon Musk buys Twitter: A look at Vijaya Gadde, the content policy chief, who was fired

Who is Vijaya Gadde?

Vijaya Gadde was born in Hyderabad, and she moved to the United States at the age of three.  She completed her bachelor’s degree of science in industrial and labour relations from Cornell University. She went to New York University to study Law. She also worked as a senior director in the legal department of Juniper Networks. Just like Agrawal, she joined Twitter in 2011.

She earned nearly $17 million in 2021 as Twitter’s chief legal officer and approximately $7.3 million in 2020, according to a Bloomberg Law report. Her key responsibilities in the firm reportedly concerned dealing with tweets that involved fake news and harassment.

Perhaps the first time Gadde came into the limelight in India was when a picture of her standing with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey holding a poster that read ”Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy” went viral in 2018. The incident stirred up quite a controversy. Some critics declared the sentiment discriminatory against Brahmins, while others said it was more against the idea of caste. Still, she was forced to apologise in a series of tweets.

Gadde is also believed to have taken the decision to eventually ban former US President Donald Trump from the platform after the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, 2020.

Why was Gadde fired?

Not long after Elon Musk publicly stated that he wanted to buy Twitter for $44 billion, Vijaya Gadde found herself in the spotlight due to memes which were critical of the platform’s policies. Musk himself shared one of the memes, which was a reference to a Joe Rogan podcast from early 2019 where Gadde and Jack Dorsey discussed Twitter’s moderation efforts.

It solidified Musk’s dissatisfaction with Twitter’s policies and was perhaps the first hint toward Gadde would likely lose her job. In the aftermath of the meme, Gadde was faced with a barrage of trolls calling for her to be fired and throwing abusive comments at her, even as several users also stood up against Musk.

Musk has repeatedly voiced support for the Republican Party, even declaring that he’d be voting for candidates from the party. This paired with the fact that Elon declared himself a free speech absolutist and called Twitter’s permanent Trump ban “a mistake” only solidified that he and Gadde would not get along.

Meanwhile, Musk has indicated that he plans to form a “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” for Twitter and said that, “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.” He also wrote in a new tweet, “To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies.”