Twitter's New CEO: Parag Agrawal - More or Less?

By Ellis Asher

Image: Parag Agrawal

This week, Twitter got its new CEO.

There's now just one question worth asking, more or less?

Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter's CEO yesterday, leaving behind a history of controversies and ambiguity. Perhaps the most public of these was the infamous ban on Donald Trump's tweets, which sparked following criticisms of bias.

Twitter is infamous, even amongst other social media sites for its "echo-chamber" narrative, evident in the frequent jokes amongst users that the replies hidden behind the "sensitive content" warnings are usually the best, or at least, most honest ones.

This is hardly a problem exclusive to Twitter however, sites like Reddit face just as much moderation, the only difference between the two is that the tribalistic "separate community" narrative is actually a feature of Reddit.

There are most definitely communities on Twitter, for instance, there is a distinct catholic community, which has prominent figureheads. These thought leaders will often interact with one another, and share lots of mutual followers, creating a small community.

With the ability to interact with which ever posts they wish; I typically would only see a select angle on my feed.

The only times I would see content that I disagreed with theologically or politically is often when one of those thought leaders, or someone they followed / shared, has already put their points across combating it.

This is pretty much the definition of an echo chamber. Whereas the community mechanics of sites like Reddit create figurative eco-systems, it's often still ran by several people, who are explicitly moderating the community. Reddit users sharing the same interest can typically enjoy the freedom of using their dedicated community as a place to voice their opinions about it, even if it's unpopular.

Even though the upvoting system filters out the less popular opinions, all communities still offer the option for the user to sort the posts by controversial or new, so the posts are still accessible with minimal effort.

For twitter users, that moderation is significantly less explicit, and unless the users actively seek out the posts that are being combated on their feed and view what the original author intended for themselves, and read through the comments too, then there's a chance that they will not be exposed to an opinion that actually challenged their worldview.

This is the kingdom Agrawal will inherit from Dorsey. Jack Dorsey was seemingly unhappy with some of the decisions behind the scenes, and to many he simultaneously represented the face of the regime quashing their communities and "our man on the inside" of said regime. An awkward paradox.

I would love to end this with a prediction, or at least an idea about the direction I think twitter is going to go, but to put it simply- we just don't know.

Whether Agrawal will make sweeping changes, or even if he has the power to, is to be seen.