Coinbase's Twitter Trouble: Has Silicon Valley's Culture Gone Wrong.

The recent hiring by Coinbase of the former Vice President of Operations and User Services at Twitter Tina Bhatnagar on the surface offers a rosy story of talent acquisition in the face of the immense growth in the Crypto trading industry. Her new role at Coinbase will be Vice President of Operations and Technology which is a very significant role given that “her responsibilities will include overseeing the fast-growing startup’s customer service division.” As per the January 22nd 2018 techcrunch.com article HERE. In this post I will discuss Tina Bhatnagar and her former role at Twitter specifically how she was involved in banning of Charles C. Johnson from the platform. Furthermore, In her employment history spanning from March 2012 to June 2017 she would been directly involved in great purge of conservative writer from Twitter leading up to the climax in November 2016 and going into 2017. 1 2. What does this all mean for Coinbase, and does this culture of intolerance to right wing conservative opinions also permutate Coinbase’s corporate culture as which is headquartered out of San Francisco, California, U.S.

Twitter's History

As the introduction clearly foreshadowed, in her role as Vice President of Operations and User Services at Twitter Tina Bhatnagar was directly involved in the permanent suspension of political Activist Charles Johnson who has subsequently sued Twitter over his alleged mistreatment by them. In a January 2016 email exchange between CEO Jack Dorsey and Tina Bhatnagar it was insinuated that the suspension of Charles C. Johnson not strictly related to company’s rules but rather a judgement call. Tina Bhatnagar further clarifies in an email “We perma suspended Chuck Johnson even though it wasn’t direct violent threats. It was just a call that the policy team made”3. Given how many other permanent suspensions of conservative voices were “called” under Tina’s watch we should all be very concerned that this approach to censorship of conservative views is a more widespread problem which also includes Coinbase’s corporate culture.

Project Veritas Confirms Bias at Twitter

We were all surprised when the project Veritas videos came out related Twitter’s widespread shadow banning of conservative voices. As explained by Abhinov Vadrevu, a former Software Engineer at Twitter explains to use how “The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.”4. Further to this disgraceful activity of shadow banning it was confirmed by Content Review Agent Mo Norai at Twitter that left leaning content would be allow through without much scrutiny, and that although this was not specifically Twitter’s policy it was the norm of behavior encouraged by senior management at Twitter. These unwritten rules sounds a lot like Tina’s “It was just a call” but to be fair past behavior is not a perfect indicator of how someone may act in the future. As James O’Keefe succinctly put “What kind of world do we live in where computer engineers are the gatekeepers of the ‘way people talk?’ This investigation brings forth information of profound public importance that educates people about how free they really are to express their views online.”5.

The Opportunity for Steemit to Write a Wrong

This form of centralized thought and information manipulation goes against the very essence of Steemit which is a decentralized platform which aim to stimulate thoughtful debate which allow information to be judge by the community of peoples within it. The Crypto Currency community must ensure that the company cultures which permute its principle corporate actors align with the values of freedom of though and conscience and right to the free flow of information. This pillar of flow of information will allow communities to decide their destinies and not have them be dictated by technology companies. Coinbase should actively demonstrate that its corporate values are not capture by any specific ideology, but rather that they are actively contributing the continued decentralization of control and empowerment of peoples.