The wild Twitter overhaul Parag Agrawal never got to finish

Before Elon Musk’s buyout abruptly cut short his tenure as Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal had a major architectural overhaul of the platform actively in the works, he revealed in an interview earlier this year.

Asked if he had any radical or ‘crazy’ ideas planned for Twitter — in the mold of Satya Nadella funding a non-profit AI startup at Microsoft — Agrawal confirmed several ambitious internal projects designed to change how users experienced the platform, including Project Saturn and Bird Watch. The company had already funded the decentralised social media protocol Blue Sky before he even took the helm.

‘I think there were crazy things to be done. I think like Birdwatch, as we used to call it, or community nodes for moderation, was something I was building and super excited about. We had this thing called project Saturn, which was crazy on how to change the content moderation regimen. We had this notion of how we would change the recommendation system,’ Agrawal said.

He said his team was ‘going to shape Twitter to be very radically different than what it had been,’ but he did not get the full opportunity to carry it out. Agrawal is now the founder of AI startup Parallel Web Systems.