For those who know the inner workings of Twitter, it was another sign of the rising influence of Gadde, the connected, liberal-leaning lawyer who has helped drive the company to more heavily regulate what users can say and post. Twitter’s new rules, from the ad ban to its deletion of controversial Covid-19 tweets, have rippled through Silicon Valley and caused huge blowback in American politics, where many—especially conservatives—now see Twitter as unfriendly territory.

She has also helped put Twitter’s policy squarely at odds with Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg had declared it wrong for private companies to “censor” politicians.

Gadde was a lead architect of the policy approach that led Twitter to clamp down on everyone from everyday harassers to the Proud Boys to President Donald Trump, and she’s been out front in defending it, arguing that the shift makes sense as corporate strategy. Said Gadde in an interview by phone from her home in San Francisco in July, of the decision to ban political ads: “It wasn’t about anything other than, ‘This is the right thing to do for us as a company.’”