This exec was central to banning Trump on Twitter. Now she’s facing thorny issues in democracies abroad

“To me, there’s nothing better than having a political discourse in plain and open view and having access to your elected officials, and being able to hold them accountable,” Gadde, then Twitter’s general counsel, told the audience at a New York University School of Law event. “In that sense, I think it’s a great thing because this wasn’t always possible before.””Now,” she added, “the consequences of that direct dialogue are unfolding in front of us and not something we could’ve quite predicted.” Less than three years later, the United States faced the most troubling consequence yet: A group of rioters attacked Capitol Hill on January 6 after Trump spent weeks using social media platforms to agitate his base and spread a lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. Gadde, who by then had become head of legal, policy and trust at Twitter, found herself at the center of deciding whether to take the unprecedented step of banning Trump from Twitter. Twitter’s position in India remains precarious. Its presence there is much smaller than rivals like YouTube, Facebook and its subsidiary WhatsApp, which have hundreds of millions of Indian users, often making Twitter a convenient scapegoat. “If the [Indian government] were to go out and shut down WhatsApp, that would cause a significant backlash from the general public,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. “But shut down Twitter? Not as much.”There’s also more at stake for Twitter. Both India and Nigeria are among the world’s largest and fastest-growing internet user bases. The way Gadde’s team and Twitter resolve its challenges in those countries could have big implications for the company’s growth and the future of the internet, according to Paul of the Tech Transparency Project. “This is something that’s certainly going to be watched globally and [will be] the model for how companies deal with it moving forward,” she said.