Elon Musk’s criticism of a content decision taken by the Twitter Legal team Inc. was followed by a wave of abusive tweets directed against the best lawyer in the company, Vijaya Gadde.
Musk, which has 86.4 million followers on Twitter and has entered into an agreement to buy the company for $ 44 billion, often uses the site as a means of criticizing Twitter decisions, especially when they imply prohibiting The accounts of people who violate the rules of the platform, some of them that Musk considers to be unjustly sidelined.
On Tuesday, he criticized a decision that the company made in 2020 for blocking a story from New York Post on Hunter Biden. He called the “incredibly inappropriate” movement. Although he did not identify Gadde by name, the post was in response to an article in which she was mentioned in a good place.
Musk reacted to a Tweet from Saagar Evidence, host of a political podcast, which in turn referred to a politico report that Gadde melted in tears during a meeting with its staff this week.
“Vijaya Gadde, the best defender of Twitter censorship who slipped the world on Joe Rogan’s podcast and censored the story of Hunter Biden, is very upset by the takeover of @elonmusk”, tweeted .
The history of the post referenced by Etjeti had alleged that Biden, son of the candidate at the time, Joe Biden, had inappropriate links with a framework of a Ukrainian energy company. Twitter then reversed this decision, but not before he was accused of censor information that could have harmed a democratic candidate.
Musk’s remark was followed by a barrage of negative comments from Twitter users. Some have used explanatives or racist insults referring to the Indian heritage of Gadde, including words as “curry” and references to the Indian castes system. Others have used derogatory explanations or language and blamed it from having “destroyed countless @twitter accounts for having said the truth”. Some have called for her dismissal or suggested that she should leave alone. Some of the abusive tweets were then deleted for violating Twitter rules.
On Wednesday, Musk published an additional tweet with a meme on the “left bias” of Twitter. He presented Gadde’s face and pulled a reprimand from the former Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, who asked why Musk “made a business manager that you just bought the target of harassment and threats” .
Twitter, based in San Francisco, refused to comment.
Musk often said that his goal was to make the social media platform a bastion of freedom of expression. “By” freedom of expression “, I simply want to say what corresponds to the law,” he said in a tweet on Tuesday. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.” In Some cases, his remarks cause his considerable fans base to publicly make fun of the people he criticized, of a local health official at the start of the Pandemic at the current CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal.
Some racist comments that followed his Tuesday tweet also established a link with Agrawal, which is also of Indian origin. Musk also kicked Agrawal, displaying a meme last year overlapping his face to the Russian dictator Joseph Staline. The tampered image represented Agrawal, former director of technology at Twitter, co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey of Twitter, just as Stalin did to the leader of the Soviet Secret Police Nikolai Yezhov.
Some users have publicly urged Dorsey to assume responsibility for decisions during his mandate, since Gadde was reported to him, or at least defend his work. But he was silent, even if other employees, including the former CEO EV Williams, sounded to defend her.
Musk’s comments on the legal decision coincided with a titles deposit on Tuesday with the details of the Twitter transaction, including a section on “public ads” which had a limitation of what Musk can tweet. He is always authorized to discuss the Twitter agreement, but not in derogatory terms, according to the file.