Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo appeared to direct a terse message on Wednesday to the corporate’s new overlord, Elon Musk: “Bullying is not leadership.”
Musk spent a part of his day publicly attacking one in every of his new staff on the platform he stated he would buy two days earlier, which sparked condemnation from an array of Twitter customers and prompted his hordes of diehard followers to lob verbal abuse her way.
“What’s going on? You’re making an executive at the company you just bought the target of harassment and threats,” wrote Costolo, who ran Twitter from 2010 to 2015, in a direct response to one in every of Musk’s tweets.
Musk, the world’s richest man, had been selecting a struggle with Twitter’s prime lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, who has been on the firm for greater than a decade and served as drive for change in recent times on a platform lengthy affected by verbal abuse and misinformation. She performed a central half in Twitter’s choice to ban former President Donald Trump, CNN reported last year.
On Tuesday, a right-wing political commentator, Saagar Enjeti, labeled Gadde Twitter’s “top censorship advocate” for limiting the unfold of a narrative about first member of the family Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. Musk responded to Enjeti immediately, calling the choice “incredibly inappropriate.”
Gadde was reported to have shown emotion throughout a digital assembly together with her workforce on Monday, when she expressed concern over the route the corporate was headed beneath Musk’s management.
Wednesday afternoon, Musk posted a picture criticizing Gadde utilizing pictures from an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast during which Gadde appeared and hung out defending the content material moderation insurance policies she helped form. His tweet alleged that Gadde has pursued insurance policies that betray her “left wing bias.”
In the Joe Rogan episode, launched in 2019, Gadde defended the positioning’s coverage towards misgendering transgender folks, citing analysis on suicide charges in the neighborhood.
Musk is broadly anticipated to loosen the principles about what folks can publish to Twitter, which might doubtless enhance the quantity of hate speech on the positioning. Like Gadde, many Twitter staffers are reportedly concerned about how Musk will run the platform.
He addressed the controversy not directly in another tweet late Wednesday afternoon: “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” But he didn’t elaborate on the sorts of “upsetting” selections he would make.
New York Times podcaster Kara Swisher, a longtime tech journalist, provided a bleak answer to Costolo’s query about Musk’s motivation for publicly disparaging an worker.
“What’s going on: He’s trying to goad people into leaving and it’s an odious way of doing it,” Swisher stated. “He’d rather they quit, than pay them out.”
Gadde has not spoken publicly on Musk’s assaults. Twitter declined to remark.
