Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been on a tour of India this past week, interacting with policymakers, politicians, actors, and more. Unfortunately he's also managed to land himself in some hot soup because he (or his PR team) didn't pay enough attention.
Reuters
A photo of Dorsey has been doing the rounds on Twitter for the past two days, from a round table discussion he attended. Alongside prominent women journalists, writers, activists, and others, they were discussing the safety of women online, and on Twitter especially. The problem? He was pictured like this on the social media platform.
As you can expect, the right-leaners on Twitter were not pleased. They accused Dorsey of everything from bigotry, to racism, to promoting hate speech.
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Now, many of you may have hoped Twitter would stand behind the photo, perhaps simply clarifying that the poster was a gift pertaining to the event. Well they did the latter, but sadly not the former. Twitter's legal head was quick to deliver an unofficial apology, before the company's India team also issued one of its own.
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"It is not a statement from Twitter or our CEO," Twitter said, "but a tangible reflection of our company's efforts to see, hear, and understand all sides of important public conversations that happen on our service around the world."
Twitter representatives later reached out to us with a statement saying, "The sentiments expressed on the poster do not reflect the views of Twitter as a company or Jack as the CEO, and we regret that this picture has detracted from an otherwise insightful trip to India."
Now, whether or not I agree with Twitter's stance on the matter, there is one fact here that transcends all religious and racial boundaries. Someone at Twitter fell asleep on the job.
The poster wasn't pictured in a "private photo" as Vijaya Gadde seems to indicate. It was presented to Dorsey by a Dalit activist at the event, speaking out about the vitriolic social media experience people from her community experience every day. More importantly though, that photo was clicked by a Twitter India representative and forwarded to the participants to post if they wanted to.
So Twitter, unwilling to take an actual stance on the issue, decided it was still cool to have their CEO pose in a context that clearly comes down on one side of the debate. Yet they still sent out the photo that damned them the most? I mean, the entire event was off the record, so that photo might have never seen the light of day if they hadn't sent it out.
Yeah, so someone at Twitter India might be getting fired. Either they're satisfied after having been able to push their agenda, or they're really regretting not paying more attention.