ascension to the top post at Twitter could stoke greater adoption of local innovation and calm regulatory turbulence faced by the world’s largest microblogging platform in key markets such as India according to company executives and privacy experts.
The 37-year-old computer scientist has replaced cofounder Jack Dorsey as CEO
at a critical juncture for the San Francisco-based company, which is under pressure from investors to jump-start growth and settle controversies with political circles both within the US and India. “He’s been my choice for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs,” Dorsey said in a note to employees shared on Twitter on Monday. “I know that Parag will be able to channel this energy best because he’s lived it and knows what it takes.”
Agrawal—the youngest to head an S&P 500 company, nudging out Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg—”will have to do a bit of balancing”, according to cyber law expert Pavan Duggal who is expecting “a more balanced, nuanced view” as “he is from India and understands the Indian ecosystem, ethos, and laws”.
Shortly after news of his appointment broke on Monday night, Twitter users primarily in the US
pounced on a decade-old tweet of Agrawal, quoting a ‘Daily Show’ joke about how treating all Muslims as terrorists was analogous to treating all White people as racists. The trolling reflects Twitter’s challenges both in India where it has had multiple run-ins with the ruling party members as well as in its home market.
“Twitter’s commitment to freedom of speech can’t be doubted or faulted but if you operate in a jurisdiction, you have a choice of either complying with the laws or vacating it,” Duggal said.
India is Twitter’s second-largest market after the United States with 58.5 million users, according to Statista. In recent months the microblogging platform has come under government scrutiny for refusing to delete accounts and for tweets pertaining to the farmer protests earlier in the year. Twitter had said the mandate violated India’s law on freedom of expression. It eventually complied with the government directive after Delhi HC refused to side with Twitter ruling that the government is “free to take any action” against it.
Industry experts said it remains to be seen how Agrawal will be able to work with the Indian government on resolving these flare-ups that have threatened its legal immunity as an intermediary under the Information Technology Act.
Applauding Agrawal’s appointment, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar, said, “For decades, Indians in the US—like my generation—distinguished themselves in design n development roles… Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Arvind Krishna and now Parag Agrawal and so many others have rewritten the narrative of Indian geek engineers into one of hard-charging global technology business leaders.”
Social media firms, including Twitter, are expected to push back against the recommendation by the Joint Parliamentary Committee
to treat social media companies as content publishers in the Personal Data Protection Bill.
Public policy experts are of the view that strong “ethnicity connect” with one of the world’s largest markets helps companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe. Twitter should be no different.
“The Indian government and political leadership itself connects better to ethnic Indian leaders and could be less abrasive with them than they have been with Twitter leadership,” said Prasanto K Roy, a public policy expert. “New Delhi’s expectations could also go up—for instance all engagement must happen with Parag Agarwal and not an India-based CEO.”
India-led Innovation
Twitter aims to double its revenue by 2023 and drive aggressive user acquisition globally. Doubling its annual revenue would mean going from $3.7 billion in 2020 to at least $7.5 billion in 2023.
Company executives are of the view that Agrawal’s Indian roots may lead to a lot more innovation being sourced from here both for Twitter’s local and global markets.
Manish Maheshwari, senior director-new markets entry at Twitter, tweeted Tuesday that Agrawal was sharp, understated and grounded, and gets the emerging and new markets instinctively and viscerally.
Still, Twitter will have to ramp up its India leadership, engagement and public policy.
“His (Agarwal’s) Indian origin will give him insights into India that his predecessor may not have had, and into Indian needs. I’d expect to see more India-relevant products up ahead, driven partly by an ‘Indian chief’ at the helm,” Roy said.
Parminder Jeet Singh, executive director at think tank IT for Change, believes that while Agrawal will have more mind space for India, other expectations may be misplaced.
“Parag must be a brilliant engineer with a brilliant business mind. He represents a company that runs in the interest of its shareholders. You have to see why he was put in and Dorsey replaced,” he said. “Startup (founders) do have an evangelical personality about them, and a typical career business leader is not like that. A good question is whether the startup mentality will shift to be more business focused.”
Agrawal will be
the latest addition to a long list of Indian-origin CEOs in Silicon Valley. He has worked as a researcher for Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc., and AT&T Corp., according to his LinkedIn profile. He joined Twitter in 2011 when the company had fewer than 1,000 employees and was appointed the company’s chief technology officer in 2017. Graduating in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2005, Agrawal earned his doctorate from Stanford University in 2012.
