Elon Musk takes aim at Twitter legal head Vijaya Gadde as ‘free musketeers’ rejoice his buyout – Times of India

WASHINGTON: Yet another top Indian-American executive at Twitter has come under fire from Elon Musk, the billionaire buyer of the social media platform, in what is emerging as a battle between free-speech absolutists and the more traditional establishment advocating boundaries.
Barely has the ink on the agreement to purchase Twitter dried, the incoming owner trained his gun on Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety issues, who has been described as “the most powerful social media executive you’ve never heard of” and “Joseph Goebbels in a pant suit.”

Musk evidently agrees with the latter description. On Tuesday, he took aim at Gadde, albeit indirectly, criticizing her for “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story” and saying, it was “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”

He was responding to a tweet by Saagar Enjeti, an Indian-American conservative commentator, who referred to a report in Politico that Gadde had broke down in tears at a meeting with her staff this week after the Musk buyout of Twitter.

“Vijaya Gadde, the top censorship advocate at Twitter who famously gaslit the world on Joe Rogan’s podcast and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, is very upset about the @elonmusk takeover,” Enjeti tweeted.
Gadde is a lightning rod for rightwing activists who believe she is instrumental in shutting down conservative pro-Trump voices on Twitter, including initiating a lifetime ban on the former President. Many of them believe Twitter is biased towards the liberal left.

While liberals insist that Trump’s lies and mendacity has been well-chronicled, the former President’s surrogates paint a picture of runaway censorship by Big Tech.
“So the ayatollah, and numerous other dictatorial regimes can have Twitter accounts with no issue despite threatening genocide to entire countries and killing homosexuals etc… but The President of the United States should be permanently suspended. Mao would be proud,” Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr had raged.
Some Trump supporters had drawn up a “watchlist” of big tech execs, including Gadde and Parag Agrawal, the current CEO, both of whom are expect to be ousted once the formality of Musk’s buyout is completed.

Gadde had also triggered outrage in India during a visit by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey when some activists blamed her for him holding up a placard that read “Smash Brahmin Patriarchy.” Gadde had subsequently apologised for the incident, saying it was not reflective of Twitter’s views and it was meant to be a private photo with a gift just given to the visiting delegation.
Coming to the US as a three-year old, Gadde grew up in Beaumont, Texas, a ruby red district replete with racism (nearby Vidor was known as one of the most hateful places in Texas where Blacks had to leave town before sundown).
One of her formative experiences she has said is her out-of-work chemical-engineer father being told by his boss to get permission from a local Ku Klux Klan leader to go door to door collecting insurance premiums. In June 2020, Twitter turfed out KKK leader David Duke from the platform.