The new Twitter general counsel is working to protect free speech and privacy here and abroad, in March filing a law suit in Turkey to challenge the ban on Twitter resulting in the lifting of the ban after two weeks. Born in India, Vijaya Gadde, 39, is intent on protecting international traffic that accounts for 78 percent of the company’s active users. But that traffic contributes only 27 percent of its revenues so Twitter is focused on increasing its profitability. (Bloomberg News, May 12, 2014, by Sarah Frier)
Gadde is continuing the work of her predecessor Alex Macgillivray in fighting against censorship, but the quest for free speech and profit isn’t that easy. “That imperative will become far more acute if the company goes public, and Twitter confronts pressures to make money fast and play nice with the governments of countries in which it operates; most Twitter users live outside the United States and the company is already opening offices overseas,” wrote Somini Sengupta, The New York Times, September 2, 2012. Twitter went public on November 7, 2013.
Twitter has been at the center of some free speech skirmishes recently in the U.S. including one involving a police raid to determine the owner of a Twitter account that parodied a Peoria, Illinois mayor. A Peoria newspaper reported that the mayor ordered the raid. Twitter suspended the account in mid-March after which the police executed a search warrant at the home of a suspect on April 15, seizing computers and smart phones. (Fox News, April 22, 2014)