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Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on whistleblower story

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Re: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on whistleblower story

#41

Post by pnf »

eis wrote: post #16

On the one hand we have a legend with impressive track record that is trying to bring to light serious issues at a large company and he has not much to gain but a lot to lose by making false accusations. On the other hand we have the Twitter CEO who does not have any comparable track record and has all to gain by trying to deflect and a lot to lose by admiting that the company under him has serious issues. He does ha…

Eh, hard to grok why you think Twitter is not evil like Facebook. Have we learned nothing about the public/private partnership between the social media companies and the surveillance state? Twitter management is littered with "former" government officials. For all we know, Mudge himself and his whistle are moves in an ongoing internecine fight over who calls the shots at a valuable tool of social control. We were recently treated to a completely astroturfed whistleblower at Facebook. Fool me once...

Caveat emptor and Cui bono.

Re: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on whistleblower story

#42

Post by pjs_ »

This person seems to be pretty far out of their depth TBH. Writing emails like this genuinely is difficult and you are optimizing for a very diverse set of stakeholders - not just engineers - but this is amateur hour. From a purely utilitarian perspective the cost/benefit of directly attacking Mudge obviously doesn't work out.

Re: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on whistleblower story

#43

Post by skrtskrt »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #39
eis wrote: post #16

On the one hand we have a legend with impressive track record that is trying to bring to light serious issues at a large company and he has not much to gain but a lot to lose by making false accusations. On the other hand we have the Twitter CEO who does not have any comparable track record and has all to gain by trying to deflect and a lot to lose by admiting that the company under him has serious issues. He does ha…

Just curious: why is FB evil but TWTR isn't? They both seem to share similar social media posts and both seem to apply quite a bit of censorship at times.

Faking video engagements stats to convince a whole generation of small news sites to pivot to video and ultimately fail.

Running psychological experiments on users.

Amplifying hate groups associated with everything from genocide in Myanmar to the groups that brought Kyle Rittenhouse to Kenosha.

Blatantly breaking state facial recognition laws.

I’m sure that’s just scratching the surface.

Re: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on whistleblower story

#44

Post by dylan604 »

arkitaip wrote: post #15

To imply that Mudge was responsible for Twitter's poor security practices when he only worked at the company for the past two years makes me believe that the allegations are true and the leadership is absolute shit. Also, implying that the dude who worked at DARPA and, maybe even more impressive, who was part of L0pht is incompetent is ludicrous.

I've seen some genuinely very smart people unable to perform at their level because of the baggage holding them back in the current environment. To those unwilling to admit the baggage, I could see how it would come across as incompetent especially when it would be advantageous to the employer.

These managment types that refuse to see that core components are just bad/wrong so that the right thing is to scrap and replace. However, that is always seen as expensive and very disruptive. So if you can't come up with a way to change the tire while the car is running 65mph down the highway, then you're not able to do your job as hired. Therefore, incompetent. QED /s

Re: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on whistleblower story

#46

Post by remus »

potamic wrote: post #28

Absolutely zero reason to say "who was terminated for ineffective leadership and poor performance". That context is not at all relevant to this matter and comes off as an attempt to distract from the subject in matter. And it doesn't bode well for employees to see their CEO mud slinging at former employees like that. You could be next! Besides, surely they know such messages eventually reach the public eye and give p…

> Absolutely zero reason to say "who was terminated for ineffective leadership and poor performance". That context is not at all relevant to this matter and comes off as an attempt to distract from the subject in matter.

While it is distasteful I think it is also relevant. If twitter have an actual reason for firing him they'll want to make it clear, so that it doesn't look like they got rid of him to try and sweep his concerns under the carpet.

In practice it's hard to say whether it works. They can't go into detail about why he was dismissed which means no one on the outside is really any the wiser about whether he was dismissed because twitter had legitimate concerns about his performance or whether they don't like what he had to say.

Re: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on whistleblower story

#48

Post by googlryas »

nkotov wrote: post #18

> who was terminated in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance. Gotta love how Parag goes straight to attempting to discredit the person instead of focusing first on the claims.

Yes, especially how in the announcements where he was no longer with the company, they said they couldn't elaborate due to "employment and privacy concerns". But now that he makes an allegation against them, they don't need to worry about privacy?

Re: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on whistleblower story

#49

Post by remus »

andrewingram wrote: post #11

It feels very unusual for a CEO to comment on the circumstances of an exec's departure like this. It's hard to take away a message that isn't "we're trying to discredit this man" - which is a logical objective, but it feels far more transparent than what I have come to expert.

> It feels very unusual for a CEO to comment on the circumstances of an exec's departure like this.

It's unusual circumstances. Im sure if there wasn't a huge newspiece in CNN Parag/twitter would have said exactly nothing.

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