Who are you, Mr. Agrawal?

So Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of social networking site Twitter, is now fully engaged in his Bitcoin project, Block (formerly Square). Rumors that Dorsey was leaving have been circulating since 2020. One of the investors who owns a stake in Twitter (investment fund Elliott Management) urged Jack to choose one of the companies, since, in his opinion, Dorsey will not be able to equally engage in both projects. In addition to Twitter, founded in 2006, Dorsey founded the transfer and payments project Square in 2009, but in late 2021 renamed it to Block, showing a greater focus on blockchain and cryptocurrency. And here is Dorsey did their choice in favor of the Block company. To paraphrase the classic – “The Bitcoin world won, the crypt was stronger.”

What is known about the new CEO of Twitter?

His name is Parag Agrawal, he is 37 years old. He was born in the family of a high-ranking official from the Ministry of Atomic Energy of India and a former teacher in the city of Ajmer, Rajasthan. The family later moved to Mumbai. First, he studied at the central school for nuclear energy number four under the Ministry. There are 31 such educational institutions throughout India and they are created especially for the children of employees of the Ministry of Atomic Energy. He received his BS in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay in 2005.

After that, he continued his studies in the United States at Stanford University, where he received a PhD in Computer Science (PhD), the topic of work is Incorporating Uncertainty in Data Management and Integration. He joined a research group focused on databases that enable computers to store and retrieve large amounts of digital information. Among Stanford University students, Agrawal stood out for his deep understanding of mathematics and the theory that underlies computer science, according to Jennifer Weedom, its academic advisor.

While Agrawal was studying, he managed to do an internship in such serious companies as Microsoft, Yahoo, AT&T, according to the questionnaire on the Likedin website (everywhere he has a job in research for 4 months). Well, then he went to Twitter, where he stayed for a long time – about 10 years. Agrawal’s specialization in databases made him an excellent candidate for working on Twitter, because a social network must very quickly process a huge amount of data coming from tens and hundreds of millions of users. He joined the company in 2011 before completing his PhD degree and became a member of the engineering team overseeing advertising-related technologies. It was then that the talents of the future CEO showed up. The ad team was one of the first in the company to use machine learning extensively. With his help, Agrawal and his colleagues developed targeted advertising methods, which boosted Twitter’s revenues.

He then quit advertising and became a member of the Twitter Architecture Group (TAG). This group of leading engineers was formed to analyze and improve the company’s projects under development. In 2017, Paraga was named Twitter’s CTO following the departure of Adam Messenger, who took over as one of the vice presidents in 2011 and then became CTO in 2013.

In general, Agrawal did not fall under the scopes of the media and did not particularly stand out anywhere. He was engaged in the infrastructure of Twitter, sometimes it is not entirely acceptable for the company: some products or functions were not launched, but thanks to Paragu, it switched to cloud services from Google and Amazon. In total, there were two high-profile news related to Agrawal. The first is just his promotion to CEO, and the second is Dorsey’s project called Bluesky… It is an initiative to create a decentralized protocol for social media interaction. On the web are called nothing but a utopia. As Jack himself said:

“Twitter is funding a small, independent team of five open source architects, engineers and designers to develop an open and decentralized social media standard. The goal is for Twitter to eventually become a client of this standard. ”

By the way, Agrawal was named one of the curators of the Bluesky project from Twitter in 2019. And as he spoke about the project:

“We believe empowering more individuals and third parties can help solve problems for communities and help more people.”

In early 2020, Agrawal invited the first members of the working group – representatives of Mastodon and ActivityPub, software for creating decentralized networks. And in August 2021, Jay Graber from Happening, a decentralized social network, was hired as project leader. In January 2021, she published a report detailing her research on decentralized web systems. True, in the case of Bluesky, it was not explained how the project would work, but in these studies there was a vector of development direction.

It talked about standards for moderation, privacy, and monetization. Graber also worked over the Zcash cryptocurrency created by the Electric Coin Company. And Agrawal led the implementation of methods for sending cryptocurrency donations to Twitter. So Dorsey’s departure towards blockchain and cryptocurrencies speaks of some of his more global project. But perhaps this is just a coincidence.

Anyway, On the page You can read more about Bluesky on GitHub. But even with what is described, this initiative looks utopian. In fact, Dorsey wants every user of any social network to be able to filter their own content, and the algorithms of social networks would help him in this.

But back to Agrawal. According to Dorsey on his Twitter microblog:

“Parag was behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around.”

At the same time, there were a number of controversial decisions and scandals. So, due to problems with cropping photos, a technical bug was moved to the sphere socio-political… Moreover, on the one hand, an independent study carried out really came to the conclusion that the algorithm makes a choice in favor of a lighter skin color in the photo, on the other hand, the company investigated this incident and came to the conclusion that the bug is still technical, but the algorithm was turned off. At the same time, Twitter’s different algorithm singled out tweets of certain politicians to the detriment of others. Or, for example, blocking the account of Donald Trump, who did not violate the rules of the community, but at the same time caused a lot of trouble for the social network.

Well, more recently – about 3 thousand accounts of “state propaganda” were deleted on Twitter. This happened already under the new CEO. Constant accusations of the company’s own censorship for the sake of modern popular trends in society are not new, and from different angles. That’s what Agrawal spoke in his interview with MIT Technology Review on disinformation in 2020:

“Our role is not related to the First Amendment, it is to serve healthy public conversation, and our actions reflect what we believe leads to it. Here’s what we do about it: focus less on free speech, and think about how times have changed. One of the changes we are seeing today is the simplification of speech on the Internet. Most people can speak. Our role is especially emphasized by those who can be heard. Today, a scarce commodity is attention. There is a lot of content. There are many tweets, but only a few of them grab attention. And so our role is increasingly shifting towards how we recommend content, and it’s kind of a challenge to ensure that these recommendation systems work in a way that directs people’s attention to healthy dialogue. “

At the same time, his participation in the project on the decentralized exchange of information between social networks shows deeper plans for the methods of using censoring and moderation. On the other hand, thanks to a smart feed and a moderation system, it will be possible to sell goods, services, content, the user will be less involved in “unnecessary” content. And which of this misinformation and unnecessary material will most likely be decided by the algorithm of social networks, including Twitter. Decentralized moderation will make this easier.

It is known that Agrawal’s views correspond to modern trends in American and European society, coupled with his origins, this makes him the most convenient candidate for the role of head of Twitter for shareholders. And, as he said in an interview with MIT, “you need to think about how times have changed, and pay less to free speech.”

In addition, Agrawal has not yet been involved in any loud scandal, no matter how hard they try to pull an owl onto a globe with his tweet eleven years ago.

Everyone also notes that he is the youngest top manager of a large company and he eleventh or the twelfth person from India to take up a post in an American company.

And finally, contrary to one of the popular claims that the previous head was 16 years in the company, Dorsey left Twitter for a long time – from 2008 to 2015. And just with the return of Dorsey to Twitter were personnel purges in the leadership, in one of them Agrawal was appointed technical director. Now it was Agrawal’s turn to purge the company. And this practice has long been used in all companies: when the top directorate changes, its team changes to the team of the newcomer.