Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s departure as CEO on Monday leaves a mixed legacy at Twitter, which saw user growth and profitability for the first time under his tenure. But Dorsey also presided over high-profile controversies about protected speech and censorship, culminating with the dialogue around the Jan. 6 insurrection that led to the banning of its most prominent user, former President Donald Trump.
Political maelstroms and misinformation issues won’t go away as new CEO Parag Agrawal takes over the San Francisco company. Case in point: On Monday, Agrawal’s 2010 tweet, which he later said was a quote from “The Daily Show,” sparked backlash, particularly among conservative users who saw it as evidence of bias: “If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists.”
Agrawal, who joined Twitter in 2011 and has been chief technology officer since 2017, said in an interview in April with the MIT Technology Review that grappling with misinformation has no easy solutions and that the company continued to work with academics on the issue.
“What we’ve realized in working with experts from many places is that it’s very, very challenging to boil down the nuances and intricacies of what we consider a healthy public conversation into a few simple-to-understand, easy-to-measure metrics that you can put your faith in,” Agrawal said.
Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s new CEO, is a Stanford alum and was previously the company’s chief technology officer.
Twitter remains the premier place for breaking news, commentary and internet culture, but misleading tweets and how to regulate them continue to be a challenge. The company and other tech firms have come more frequently into clashes with the government, from antitrust regulators to conservatives alleging bias and launching social media competitors, which have yet to gain widespread popularity.
“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment but …to serve a healthy public conversation, and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” Agrawal told the MIT Technology Review.
Twitter didn’t make Agrawal or Dorsey available for interviews. The company’s stock fell 2.74% on Monday to $45.78 per share on the news.
Dorsey’s departure is also another instance of a big tech company losing a founder as CEO, though he directly pushed back against the idea that such an arrangement is superior.
“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led.’ Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure. I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders,” Dorsey wrote in an email to Twitter employees that he shared publicly. Dorsey said Agrawal was “behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around” and “my trust in him as our CEO is bone deep.”
Earlier this year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO, leaving Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and the newly named Meta as the sole original leader of the biggest five tech companies. Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent, are all led by non-founders.
Dorsey had an at-times contentious relationship with fellow Twitter co-founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass. Dorsey was originally ousted as CEO in 2008 and was replaced by Williams, but returned to lead the company in 2015. Dorsey simultaneously led the payments startup he founded, Square, and his split leadership roles were criticized by some activist investors.
While Twitter has high-profile users like politicians and celebrities and is a favorite of journalists, its user base lags far behind old rivals Facebook and YouTube and newer ones such as TikTok. It has just over 200 million daily active users, a common industry metric.
Agrawal is far less known than Dorsey. He previously worked at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T in research roles. At Twitter, he’s worked on machine learning, revenue and consumer engineering, and audience growth. An immigrant from India, he studied at Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.
Twitter’s headquarters on Market Street on Jan. 10 in San Francisco.
Paul Kuroda/Special to The Chronicle
Agrawal’s promotion follows the ascension of other Indian Americans to tech’s top ranks. The CEOs of Alphabet, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe, among others, hail from India.
“Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants,” Patrick Collison, CEO of payments startup Stripe, wrote on Twitter on Monday.
The change in leadership comes at a time of transition for Twitter’s workforce, which is largely allowed to work remotely permanently through a policy change during the early part of the pandemic. The company also closed its offices in San Francisco and New York as the delta variant pushed coronavirus cases up, but those offices will reopen at reduced capacity next Monday, the company told The Chronicle.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com
