Two days after thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account.
According to The Indian Express, Twitter’s top lawyer Vijaya Gadde was at the forefront of that decision.
Gadde, the Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead at @Twitter, announced the ban alongside Twitter’s Safety account Friday.
“The account of @realDonaldTrump has been permanently suspended from Twitter due to the risk of further violence,” Gadde said.
On that same day, Twitter also permanently suspended the accounts of several high-profile Trump supporters, CNBC reports. Those supporters include former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell and President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, alongside more than 70,000 accounts associated with QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory group.
According to Politico, Gadde has played a role in several of Twitter’s most significant changes and most pivotal moments in recent years. She is the driving force behind Twitter’s shift towards regulation of speech on the platform, including a controversial 2019 political ad ban that removes all political ads from the platform.
“It wasn’t about anything other than, ‘This is the right thing to do for us as a company,'” Gadde said, Politico reports.
According to The Indian Express, Gadde was born in Hyderabad, India but immigrated to the US young, growing up in Texas, then New Jersey. A graduate of Cornell University and New York University Law School, Gadde worked at a Bay Area tech start-up law firm before joining Twitter in 2011.
Now, she holds nearly unparalleled influence in the social media behemoth —all while seeming nonexistent to the general public.
Gadde is also gaining political influence, Politico reports. Many have noticed her presence beside Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey during his 2019 meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office and his 2018 meeting with Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi.
“What I’ve been doing for the last nine years is trying to figure out the path,” Gadde said, Politico reports.
“I don’t really see an easy solution for how you moderate content at scale around the world,” Gadde continued. “There’s going to be errors, and there’s going to be corrections, and there’s going to be inconsistencies.”
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