Fact Check: Video on Elon Musk firing Twitter trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde on air is FALSE
A video of Elon Musk firing Vijaya Gadde during a show is going viral on social media claiming that Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde on air.
Elon Musk took over Twitter and made some bold decisions for the company. Right from firing some top executives like CEO Parag Agarwal, chief of Trust and Safety legal policy Vijaya Gadde, dissolving the board of directors to changing the core policies.
A video of Elon Musk firing Vijaya Gadde during a show is going viral on social media claiming that Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde on air.
This video has been shared by several users.
Fact check:
The claim that Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde on air is FALSE. This is a parody video created and shared on Twitter.
When observed carefully, the viral video contains a watermark @damonimani in the top right corner. He posted the viral video on Twitter with the caption "Footage: Elon Musk fired Twitter's head of Censorship ON AIR".
Right on the tweet thread, he states that it is a parody and that the video is on Rumble. The video was shared on the platform Rumble on October 28, 2022, by Damon Imani.
When the keyframes extracted from the video were searched using Google reverse image search, we found an IMDb page sharing the same screenshots. The page is listing an episode of the Body Language Ghost series, where Bombard's body language examines Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde as they respond to Tim Pool and Joe Rogan on Rogan's podcast.
Taking a cue from this, we searched using the keywords "Vijaya Gadde and Jack Dorsey on Rogan's podcast". Then we found a video published by YouTube Channel Powerful JRE live streamed on March 6, 2019. The episode was titled "Joe Rogan Experience #1258 - Jack Dorsey, Vijaya Gadde & Tim Pool."
In this long video, Twitter's former owner and CEO Jack Dorsey, Tim Pool, and Vijaya Gadde can be seen but not Elon Musk. The description of the video states "Jack Dorsey is a computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur who is co-founder and CEO of Twitter, and founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. Vijaya Gadde serves as the global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety at Twitter. Tim Pool is an independent journalist"
When we searched for Joe Rogan's interview with Elon musk, we found two videos. One was published in September 2018 with episode number 1169 and the other was streamed in May 2020, episode number 1470.
Both videos do not show Vijaya Gadde or anybody else other than Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. Neither does Elon Musk say "Failure comes with a big penalty. You're fired" in any of these videos.
There are no other videos that have both Elon Musk and Vijaya Gadde in the same episode and which are recent.
Therefore, the claim that Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde on air is FALSE. According to reports, he fired all the top executives of Twitter after he took over.