'Pure propaganda': Twitter goes to bat a little too hard for new CEO Parag Agrawal after dustup over him quoting a Daily Show correspondent

Sarah D | 3:10 PM on November 30, 2021

As we told you, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell made a colossal ass of himself with a thread shaming parents and vaccine skeptics for effectively gambling with his kids’ lives.

Here’s how Twitter’s been covering it:

Seems like a pretty innocuous way to frame a decidedly non-innocuous Twitter thread, but whatever.

If that’s how they smooth over Swalwell’s stupidity, you can imagine how they’ve been dealing with new CEO Parag Agrawal and the hubbub over some of his past tweets and remarks. While some of the reaction may be overblown, this seems like a pretty shady way to address it:

Good to see @Twitter is already using the trending topics to protect its new CEO from accountability. This statement is the very definition of editorializing by the way. Picking random “journalists” to cite as sources that protect your new dear leader is also pure propaganda. pic.twitter.com/a39lFgpVOg

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 30, 2021

It really does come off like propaganda. It’s one thing for Twitter to go to bat for their CEO, but it’s another thing to completely gloss over people’s legitimate questions about what his leadership will entail.

Because Twitter’s neat little summary conveniently omits these comments from Agrawal, which people actually have good reason to be concerned about:

Here's how Twitter's new CEO defined "misinformation" in a 2020 interview: "Focused way less on what's true and false" and "way more on certain content being amplified without appropriate context."

Misinformation will be things that are true but Twitter decides needs context pic.twitter.com/DDTYO45KRW

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 29, 2021

Just how committed is Twitter to transparency, really?

Who at Twitter wrote this editorial review and selected the content to feature? We have no idea. You can’t argue you’re simply a platform when you choose which content to publish & feature all day long every day. And then editorialize & collate that information.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 30, 2021

Funny how that works. Nice for the new Twitter CEO to have a global social network act as a PR firm and do damage control for him. pic.twitter.com/15tincMSkf

— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) November 30, 2021

Must be sweet.

***

Twitter bans sharing ‘images or videos of private individuals without their consent,’ but they’ll make exceptions if you’re special enough