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Parag Agrawal, this is the new CEO of Twitter

Following the unexpected resignation of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey until yesterday, the company has a new CEO: Parag Agrawal, 37, a true stranger outside the company, which has been in a decade and in which he started as an engineer, according to The Verge. Little by little, Agrawal was climbing positions since his arrival in October 2011, when his initial task was the product, that is, the social network Twitter.

This discreet manager was the first to receive the title of Outstanding Engineer in the company, and already in 2017 he was appointed CTO of Twitter. He then moved on to addressing deeper issues, from a major security issue with password security to future company initiatives such as decentralization. All in such a way that his role did not transcend the general opinion, something that he will not be able to do from now on. When his appointment was announced yesterday, he barely had 24,000 followers on Twitter. Today it is already close to 245,000.

Agrawal is the fourth CEO in the history of Twitter, after the first stage of Dorsey between 2006 and 2008, a second in which another of the founders of the company, Evan Williams, took his reins from 2008 to 2010 and a third, in which Dick Costolo was CEO of Twitter between 2010 and 2015 before Dorsey’s return to the post. During his position as CTO he has been in charge of, among other things, the supervision of the company’s decentralized platform, Bluesky, announced in December 2019.

Designed as «an open and decentralized standard for social media«, Which Twitter itself could use, Bluesky It has been one of the most spectacular ideas for the future of Twitter, and one of Dorsey’s creatures, to which Agrawal is very close, both professionally and personally. After several months in which Bluesky has hardly been heard of, in recent months it has been gaining air, and since August has led cryptocurrency developer Jay Graber as product manager. The development of Bluesky, and its potential impact as a substitute for Twitter’s supporting struts, is likely to remain an important project for Agrawal, now as CEO.

On the other hand, the new team Twitter Crypto, with Tess Rinearson at the helm, announced last November and that she reported directly to Agrawal, it is not known if she will continue directly under his supervision. This team also has among its guidelines to work side by side with that of Bluesky. This, combined with Agrawal’s interest in decentralized Web3 platforms, may give an indication of what direction Twitter may take in the future.

The experience with Bluesky can also give clues to another of the main projects as Twitter CTO, in which he has been committed for years: moving some of Twitter’s products from its servers to other more robust cloud services, such as AWS or Google Cloud. The now CEO of Twitter has also led the effort since 2018 to advance the company’s internal technology to help accelerate the pace of development and deployment.

This has led to changes such as Twitter’s agreement with Google Cloud in May 2018 to process data, and also the effort to gradually move up Twitter’s own timeline feature to AWS, a task that is expected to be completed by 2023. Other Agrawal projects focused more on solving problems than there were on Twitter. For example, it took part in the implementation of measures to correct the racial problems by the automatic cropping of the photo previews, in addition to managing the public explanation of the bug of the company’s passwords in 2018.

More recently, Agrawal has given clues on how you would fix one of Twitter’s biggest problems: moderation. In an interview in 2020, he assured that Twitter’s role was to develop a healthy place for online conversation, in addition to suggesting that this could be done at the cost of preventing people from saying what they wanted. Because he understands that the role of the network is «serve a healthy public conversation«.

It is not to say that the network is going to moderate all misinformation, because Agrawal’s vision is more on the side of avoiding the concrete damage that erroneous information can cause rather than being an arbiter of what is true or false on the Internet . In fact, the manager stated in said interview that «defining misinformation is really hard«. His stance may therefore lead him into trouble with certain politicians in the United States and other countries. In the United States, in fact, many Republicans oppose the policies of moderation of Twitter and the expulsion of Donald Trump from the network.

This is one of the many problems Agrawal will have to deal with. He inherits a position in a company that has been growing its users and launching products in recent times at a rate never seen before, but still has many difficulties. Especially in terms of the growth of users in the United States, its advertising products, the increase in its possibilities for monetization (and therefore, its income), and competition from other networks. It will be interesting to see how you approach and try to fix them.

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