Twitter Appoints Parag Agrawal as Chief Technology Officer

Twitter appointed Parag Agrawal as Chief Technology Officer on Thursday, according to an update on the social media company's website.

Parag Agrawal, who joined microblogging site in 2011 as an Ads Engineer, succeeds Adam Messinger who left in December 2016, the company said.

Agrawal earlier worked at Microsoft and AT&T prior to joining Twitter, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Chief Operating Officer Anthony Noto resigned last month in a string of departures, to join online lender Social Finance (SoFi) as CEO.

Twitter did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Twitter last week sought help to improve the quality of conversations on its micro-blogging site in a bid to address rising criticism against social media companies for failing to protect users from online abuse and political manipulation.

Twitter's new approach, it said in a blog, would be based on identifying metrics to gauge the "health of public conversations" and ways to measure it. The social network has created a webpage where anyone can submit their proposals.

Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter 'didn't fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences' of instant public messaging.

He said negative consequences that Twitter has witnessed include abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns and increasingly divisive echo chambers.

Written with inputs from Reuters