India-born Parag Agrawal, who until Sunday became the chief era officer at Twitter, has succeeded co-founder Jack Dorsey because the chief executive officer of the social media massive. But what brought about the go out of Dorsey? And what are the challenges going through Agrawal in his new position?
In September final year, a few Twitter users had mentioned that the platform’s picture previews favoured white faces to black. They published pix with a black individual’s face and a white character’s face adjoining to each different. Twitter’s image preview confirmed the white faces more frequently.
There were allegations of a racial bias inside the neural network the employer used to generate photograph previews.
Twitter’s new CEO, Agrawal, who changed into then the leader technology officer (CTO), had taken stock of the situation and admitted that the model wanted “continuous improvement”.
Agrawal become also tasked with addressing one of the organisation’s biggest challenges nowadays – content moderation. Around this time last 12 months, Twitter had labelled some tweets by former US President Donald Trump as “deceptive” and “violent”.
As Agrawal had said in an interview with MIT Technology Review in November ultimate yr, Twitter targeted on mitigating the harm that arose from sure content being amplified at the platform with out proper context. It worked less on being the arbiter of fact on the net.
“We consciousness manner more on capability for damage due to positive content being amplified at the platform with out appropriate context. And context is regularly simply additional verbal exchange that offers a one-of-a-kind factor of view on a topic so that people can see the breadth of the communique on our platform and outside and make their very own determinations in a global in which we're all studying together,” Agrawal had said.
At 37, Agrawal, who took charge as the new Twitter CEO on Monday, is the youngest CEO leading a Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 corporation. A 2005 laptop technological know-how and engineering alumnus of IIT Bombay, Agrawal had later long gone on to pursue his PhD in computer technological know-how from Stanford University. He joined Twitter in 2011 with a focal point on ad merchandise, and became the primary recipient of the corporation’s “Distinguished Engineer” title.
According to numerous media reviews, as CTO, Agrawal advocated Dorsey to permit Twitter to explore decentralisation and other related technologies.
As CEO now, we might see Agrawal himself take the reins of Twitter’s Bluesky venture, a decentralised social media protocol, Bitcoin-based tips and NFT-primarily based profile images, too.
One may consider that the Indian authorities and Twitter had been engaged in a sour standoff in advance this 12 months. First, it changed into approximately Twitter selecting not to prohibit tweets and accounts associated with farmers’ protests, even after requests from the Indian government. And later, the Indian government accused Twitter of now not complying with its new rules for social media intermediaries, even threatening criminal action in opposition to its Indian executives.
So, does having an Indian at the helm of affairs augur properly for Twitter’s fortunes in India, its 1/3-largest marketplace with 17.Five million users as of February this year? We’ll have to be patient if Parag Agrawal can flip matters around for Twitter in India.
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