The Most Powerful Social-Media Exec You Haven t Heard Of – POLITICO

Gadde pitched Dorsey on a radical idea for a fix: Maybe Twitter should just, well, stop selling political ads.

It was a bold idea no other major American platform had simply banned political ads and Dorsey wasn t immediately sold. For one thing, the company had built itself around a commitment to hosting a free-flowing public conversation. Gadde officially Twitter s head of legal, policy and trust pressed her case, and she had allies on the idea inside the building, including the head of Twitter s trust and safety team. Within days Dorsey signed off on the idea, announcing a global ban on political ads on October 30, 2019, in an 11-tweet thread detailing the company s reasoning.

For those who know the inner workings of Twitter, it was another sign of the rising influence of Gadde, the connected, liberal-leaning lawyer who has helped drive the company to more heavily regulate what users can say and post. Twitter s new rules, from the ad ban to its deletion of controversial Covid-19 tweets, have rippled through Silicon Valley and caused huge blowback in American politics, where many especially conservatives now see Twitter as unfriendly territory.

She has also helped put Twitter s policy squarely at odds with Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg had declared it wrong for private companies to censor politicians.

via www.politico.com