India-born lawyer behind move to suspend Trump’s Twitter account

An Indian American spearheaded the decision to permanently suspend US President Donald Trump’s Twitter accounts. Vijaya Gadde, a 45-year-old immigrant from India and Twitter’s top lawyer, was responsible for the move.

On Friday, the tech giant blocked Donald Trump’s Twitter handles for the first time, finally escalating its crackdown on the president’s social media posts that they believe encouraged and supported rioters at the US Capitol.

Ms Gadde, the company’s head of Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety issues, on Twitter said: “The account of @realDonaldTrump has been permanently suspended from Twitter due to the risk of further violence. We’ve also published our policy enforcement analysis–you can read more about our decision here.

Born in India, Ms Gadde moved to the US as a child and grew up in Texas, where her father worked as a chemical engineer on oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gadde family then moved to the east coast, where Vijaya completed her high school in New Jersey.

A graduate of Cornell University and New York University Law School, Gadde spent almost a decade at a Bay Area-based law firm working with tech startups before she joined Twitter in 2011.

As a corporate lawyer, Ms Gadde operates in the background herself mounding policies, but her influence has helped shape Twitter for most of the past decade. And with Twitter’s role in global politics having increased, so has Ms Gadde’s visibility.

As reported in Fortune, Ms Vijaya was in the Oval Office when Twitter co-founder and chief executive officer Jack Dorsey met with US President Donald Trump last year and even joined Dorsey when he met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November 2018.

Ms Gadde has garnered a lot of attention and has been profiled by some of the leading US publications. The Politico described Vijaya as “the most powerful social media executive you’ve never heard of”. Instyle magazine listed her in The Badass 50 2020: Meet the women who are changing the world.