Twitter has finally decided to transfer its reins from founders to professionals. India-born Parag Agrawal has succeeded co-founder Jack Dorsey as the CEO of the social media giant. So will a more diversified board, with an Indian at the helm of affairs, help the company at a time when it is aiming to double its revenue by 2023 and reinvent its image amid several allegations in recent times?
In a statement, Dorsey said the company was ready to move on from its founders. The board of directors of Twitter unanimously selected Agarwal as CEO and a member of the board.
This was not Dorsey’s first exit from the company. After co-founding the social media giant in 2006, Dorsey had been forced out in 2008. But he returned as CEO in 2015 after Dick Costolo stepped down. In 2020, Dorsey was accused of paying little attention to Twitter.
Agrawal, meanwhile, had joined Twitter in 2011 with a focus on ad products. He became the first recipient of the company’s “Distinguished Engineer” title. According to several media reports, as CTO, Agrawal encouraged Dorsey to allow Twitter to explore decentralisation and other related technologies.
A 2005 computer science and engineering alumnus of IIT Bombay, 37-year-old Agrawal is the youngest CEO leading a Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 company.
Agarwal, a known face in Silicon Valley, has a long and tough road ahead. By the end of 2023, the company wants to have 315 million monetisable daily active users. It also wants to double its revenue by then.
Apart from meeting the financial targets, Twitter will also have to do a balancing act when it comes to sensitive issues. In October this year, Twitter admitted that its algorithm was giving more space to right-wing politicians than left-leaning ones.
And in September last year, some Twitter users had pointed out that the platform’s photo previews favoured white faces to black. They posted photos of a black person’s face and a white person’s face side by side to show that Twitter’s photo previews showed white faces more often.
The social media giant had to apologise for this goof-up too. Agrawal, who was the chief technology officer (CTO) then, had taken stock of the situation and admitted that the model needed “continuous improvement”.
Agrawal is also tasked with addressing one of the company’s biggest challenges in recent times – content moderation. Around this time last year, Twitter had labelled some tweets from former US President Donald Trump as “misleading” and “violent”.
And earlier this year, the Indian government and Twitter were locked in a bitter stand-off. First, it was about Twitter choosing not to ban tweets and accounts related to farmers’ protests, despite requests from the government.
Later, the Indian government had accused Twitter of not complying with its new rules for social media intermediaries, and even threatened legal action against its India executives. The situation had cooled down only after Twitter appointed an executive based out of India.
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