Vijaya Gadde: Shortly after billionaire Elon Musk “freed” the bird, several Twitter employees, including CEO Parag Agrawal, director of legal affairs and policy Vijaya Gadde, and chief financial officer Ned Segal, were let go. Because Musk earlier accused them of misleading him and Twitter investors about the actual figures connected to bots and phoney accounts on the microblogging network, the firings weren’t entirely unexpected.
The Free Press Journal reports that Gadde received the largest compensation of Rs 610 crore, followed by Segal at Rs 544 crore and Agarwal at Rs 536 crore, despite the fact that the three did not agree with Musk. Several right-wing Twitterati organisations are celebrating Gadde’s dismissal in the meanwhile.
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Over the years, upper-caste Indians and white Americans had abused Indian-American Gadde online, most notably on two occasions: over a 2018 image of the hashtag “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy,” for which she later apologised, and over her attempts to permanently suspend Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
When the deal to buy Twitter was unveiled in April 2022, Musk also blasted Gadde for her “left-wing prejudice” and for excluding some users from the network.
The crucial query, though, is: Who is Viajay Gadde? What relationships does she have with India, and what Twitter disputes has she been involved in?
A Telugu family gave birth to Vijaya Gadde in 1974 in Hyderabad, India. However, she had never met her father before moving to Texas, in the United States, when she was just three years old. In a 2014 interview with Fortune, Gadde said that at the time her father was a struggling PhD student in America who was unable to support his family.
Only a few Indians lived in the little Texas town where Gadde was raised; racism was pervasive, and the Ku Klux Klan was heavily represented there. She told Fortune, “You don’t realise it (the KKK’s presence) when you’re a youngster,” adding that her father need their approval to sell insurance.
Later, Gadde felt that this wasn’t right and that the best way to combat racism was to practise law.
Vijaya earned her masters degree in industrial and labour relations at Cornell University in New York before moving to the city to pursue a legal education. She was a senior director at Juniper Networks’ legal division.
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Responding to harassing and fake news comments was one of her key responsibilities after she joined Twitter in 2011.
Gadde is wed to technology executive and attorney Ramsey Homsany. They have two children together. The couple normally keeps their private lives out of the public eye.
She is a South Asian woman, according to her tweets, who honours her Telugu-Hindu heritage by participating in festivals like Vinayaka Chaturthi and Diwali.
In 2018, a small group of Indian journalists and activists met behind closed doors with Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey and Gadde. According to an email sent to the attendees of the meeting, the company agreed to investigate whether caste must be included as a separate reporting category under its hateful conduct policy.
Later, when he and Gadde were spotted with the activists, Dorsey was holding a sign that read, “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy.” Immediately after Twitter was accused of “insulting Brahmins” by Hindu right-wingers and upper caste individuals, Gadde apologised and stated that Twitter was determined to remain “apolitical.”
Gadde reportedly made a key contribution to Donald Trump’s Twitter account being suspended in 2020. But during the Twitter acquisition, Musk stirred up a new round of controversy by referring to himself as a “free speech absolutist” and called Twitter’s Trump ban “a mistake.”
He even posted a meme with Gadde on it about Twitter’s “left-wing bias” during a dispute with American YouTuber Tim Pool and Dorsey on the radio programme The Joe Rogan Experience.
Gadde then experienced racist remarks being directed towards him. When referring to her Indian heritage, expletives like “curry” were used. Twitter users had mixed opinions about her; some wanted her removed from the company, while others said she deleted countless accounts for “speaking the truth.”
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