by Reina Sultan This article was originally published at Prism Last week, Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey announced that he would be stepping down as the company’s CEO. In the post, Dorsey also named Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal as his successor. Agrawal, who has worked at Twitter for 10 years, has been involved in many key Twitter initiatives, from building out AI capabilities in 2014 to working toward Dorsey’s decentralization goals in 2019. But with Dorsey stepping down, many are wondering whether the new CEO will prioritize or ramp up the effort to help the company fight hate speech and harassment on its platform. Historically, Twitter has been slow to react to white supremacists using the platform to proliferate hate. Despite Twitter’s policy on hateful conduct that bans harassment and the promotion of or threats of violence, there remains an immense amount of hate speech on the platform, often shared by verifiable white nationalists. Twitter employees and tech writers writing about the issue have pointed out that solutions for dealing with white supremacists on social media are not as easy as they might seem, particularly because AI cannot always effectively identify every instance of hate speech. Despite this, many Twitter users—particularly those who have been targets of racialized or gendered violence themselves—want the platform to do more and act faster. Twitter made headlines in January when the platform banned then-President Donald Trump after repeated violations of their hateful conduct policy—a decision made by Dorsey—but many activists, organizers, and journalists felt the ban was too little, too late, considering the years he was able to spread violent rhetoric to a massive audience on Twitter. Read more