New Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal Is Anti-American, Anti-White And Will Make A Poisonous Platform Worse

I was a blue check with a quarter of a million followers permanently suspended from Twitter. Under this new hate-filled dope, this will become commonplace and truth will be extinguished.

Agrawal, concerningly, is a vocal opponent of free speech and the First Amendment, and has sent tweets about all white people being racist: (source: National Pulse)

“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

The Indian-born migrant has used his tenure as Twitter’s tech chief to lead research on how best to silence voices across the platform under the myth of “fake news” and dismiss the ideals America was founded upon, often quoting his favorite leftist celebrities.

In a November 2020 interview, Agrawal said the following, as reported by multiple sources online:

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

“It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” – George Carlin. http://bit.ly/cgZo31

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) November 1, 2010

Eleven years prior, Agrawal sentiment was very different, showing his evolution to his current mindset toward freedom in the Free World:

I am not sure what is more troubling: death of free speech or that “peace in society” is threatened if a book is not banned.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) April 17, 2010

Agrawal’s work placed him at the helm of Project Bluesky. The research project was launched under the guise of establishing decentralized standards, supporting social media companies in the promotion of posts and providing users with greater control over the content they see.

Bluesky was further marketed as making it easier for social media networks to enforce restrictions against hate speech and other forms of online abuse.

The true Axis of Evil in America is the genius of our marketing combined with the stupidity of our people – Bill Maher. #quote

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) April 6, 2010

In 2019, Twitter purchased Fabula AI, an alleged machine learning startup that helps spot “fake news”. The details of the acqui-hire deal were not made public. At the time, Agrawal said that the purchase will “improve the health of the conversation” on Twitter.

The purchase occurred prior to the 2020 Presidential elections, helping Twitter “weed out the bad eggs.”

More evidence of the incoming Twitter CEO's political bias. Parag Agrawal donated to the ACLU so it could sue the former president. pic.twitter.com/6wldBTMA8O

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) November 29, 2021

People shouldn’t get too excited about Jack Dorsey no longer being Twitter’s CEO. The new CEO Parag Agrawal follows Dangerous Speech, a group funded by George Soros Open Society Foundation and after Trump’s Twitter ban he liked tweets like this thread comparing the right to ISIS. pic.twitter.com/sUa3CckfZ4

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) November 29, 2021

New Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal makes Dorsey look like a moderate.

Agrawal is left of Lenin.

We’re all on borrowed time.

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) November 29, 2021

How New Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal Might Make A Poisonous Platform Worse

We should not want anyone who accepts the premise that ‘free speech’ is an outmoded ambition to control major corporate platforms.

By Emily Jashinsky, The Federalist, November 30, 2021:

Jack Dorsey is leaving his platform in the hands of Parag Agrawal, the company’s chief technology officer, a man who last year said Twitter’s “role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation,” and to “focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”

Agrawal’s false binary, between healthy discourse and the First Amendment, is alarming but unsurprising. It indicates Twitter is set to devolve further from a company that seeks to decentralize the discourse to one that bolsters its corporate gatekeepers.

Setting the First Amendment—both as a legal and cultural norm—at odds with “a healthy public conversation” is obviously en vogue with culturally leftist elites. The mentality has informed a host of damaging decisions in media, entertainment, tech, and business in the last decade, especially in the wake of racial unrest in 2020.

It’s also based on postmodern nonsense. A “healthy public conversation” must include all perspectives so the correct and moral ones can emerge and prevail in the court of public opinion, rather than being adjudicated by elites and protected with force from criticism. Twitter is a private company, but Agrawal was clearly arguing against the norm of the First Amendment as the philosophy for our discourse.

The left now sees the First Amendment as an obstacle to a “healthy public conversation” because it sees anti-progressive speech as psychological violence. This is predicated on the idea that bigotry should be defined as all dissent from progressivism, and that all dissent on these questions poses a threat to safety.

That’s unhealthy. It shelters bad ideas from necessary improvements, disproportionately empowers corporatists, and wrongly conditions people to see themselves as victims. Agrawal’s approach to the “public conversation,” articulated just last year in his capacity as Twitter CTO, is very harmful.

Over at the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney argues that for all of Dorsey’s flaws, he functioned as something as a bulwark, preventing the company from a total takeover by the illiberal left. Glenn Greenwald and Saagar Enjeti made similar points. I think they’re right. In that sense, Dorsey’s transfer of power really exposes the arc of Silicon Valley, which promised to bring about decentralization and is now eagerly facilitating the very opposite. That’s set to worsen under Agrawal, who now controls a platform that dominates our media and politics.

The most important thing to know about Twitter is that nobody uses it. Those of us who use it more than once a day are vastly outnumbered. That’s both good and bad. It’s good in the sense that most Americans aren’t hooked on another corporate dopamine manipulator that distorts our culture. But it’s bad because it means Twitter users are in bubbles that encourage groupthink among powerful people in politics, media, and business.

We should not want anyone who accepts the premise that “free speech” is an outmoded ambition to control major corporate platforms. It accelerates our divorce from norms—legal, cultural, and both—that made this country a force for enormous good.

To the extent executives are still persuaded by their financial interests, and to the extent consumers are still able to influence those financial interests in monopolistic sectors of the economy, mounting public rejection of philosophies like Agrawal’s may ultimately make a difference. Twitter is struggling. Doubling down on anti-speech fantasies of a “healthy conversation” won’t help.