Republicans Warn Of ‘Censorship’ From ‘Radical’ New Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal

(by Ailan Evans | Daily Caller) – Republican lawmakers are raising concerns that Twitter’s new Chief Executive Parag Agrawal may threaten conservative political speech on the social media platform.

Agrawal, Twitter’s former chief technology officer who was announced as CEO following Jack Dorsey’s decision to step down early Monday, has previously highlighted the perceived threat of online “misinformation,” calling to depart from free speech considerations in favor of other concerns in an interview with MIT Technology Review in November 2020.

“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” Agrawal said. “The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”

Agrawal previously oversaw development efforts on Bluesky, a decentralized social media platform intended to “better control abusive and misleading information.”

Didn’t think it could get much worse than Jack Dorsey.

But yikes. pic.twitter.com/EOycoPbTTz

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) November 29, 2021

Republican lawmakers worry Agrawal may impose stricter content moderation policies and more aggressively censor conservative content.

“Based off his previous comments, it seems clear conservatives will continue to be silenced while actual calls for violence from our adversaries like Iran, China and the Taliban are offered a safe haven,” Rep. Lance Gooden, who co-chairs the Freedom from Big Tech Caucus, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Lawmakers also drew attention to Agrawal’s previous tweets, including one in which he compared assumptions regarding the prevalence of Islamic extremism to assumptions that all white people are racist.

“If they are not gonna make a distinction between Muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists,” Agrawal tweeted with quotation marks, though it is unclear who he was quoting. Read Full Article >