'Twitter Is Taking a Stand Against Online Harassment': Twitter Counsel Vijaya Gadde on 'Re/code Decode'

Twitter fights legal battles all the time, every day and across the globe.

It’s fending off government requests for user data, dealing with a constant flow of abusive and legally questionable content and is battling to keep the service online in Turkey. General counsel Vijaya Gadde is the woman responsible for balancing all these tasks, which are integral to Twitter’s business.

On this week’s episode of “Re/code Decode,” Gadde talks with executive editor Kara Swisher about her job as top lawyer for one of the world’s largest and most visible social networks.

Gadde doesn’t think Twitter is going to crack the China censorship nut anytime soon (“We are unwilling to make the compromises needed to be in that market today”), and she explained that a lot of her team’s job is to assess the veracity of government demands for Twitter user information.

“If the government doesn’t follow appropriate processes or they try to stop those conversations from happening, what you’re doing is stifling that free exchange of information. And I think that’s incredibly dangerous,” Gadde said. She also talked about Twitter’s resistance to handing over tweets related to the 2012 court case of an Occupy Wall Street protestor.

Later in the episode, Kara talks with Walt Mossberg about the expected product lineup at Apple’s event next month, and Kara riffs on Alphabet and the ABCs of aging in Silicon Valley.

If you like what you hear on “Re/code Decode,” you can also head over to “Re/code Replay,” an archive of audio content from our events and interviews by Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg, Peter Kafka, Ina Fried and more. We’ve already published about 30 episodes from past events, including all of the Code 2015 sessions, and we’ll add more over time.

Every episode for both shows will be available in two places: On our site at http://recode.net/podcasts and on Apple iTunes (here for “Re/code Decode” and here for “Re/code Replay”). We’ll be adding more distributors soon and new episodes weekly. And you can follow @recode on Twitter for updates on upcoming guests.

If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on iTunes — and, if you don’t, just strafe Kara on Twitter. You can also suggest guests for the show there and we’ll try our level best to nab them for a Red Chair interview.