Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has revealed new details of the social media platform’s recently unveiled content enforcement philosophy dubbed “freedom of speech, not reach.”
In a wide-ranging interview on CNBC, Ms. Yaccarino said that the content moderation policy that Twitter’s safety team first unveiled in April has been fine-tuned, with the platform building new brand safety and content enforcement tools that she said have addressed the delicate balance between allowing free expression and curbing the spread of harmful content.
“By all objective metrics, X is a much healthier and safer platform than it was a year ago,” Ms. Yaccarino said.
She stated unequivocally that, under the new policy, content violating legal boundaries would be met with zero tolerance, resulting in immediate removal.
“But more importantly, if you’re going to post something that is lawful, but it’s awful, you get labeled,” she said. “You get labeled, you get de-amplified, which means it cannot be shared. And it is certainly demonetized.”
Ms. Yaccarino said that, on average, 30 percent of users whose content has been labeled decide to take it down themselves and that brands are protected from the risk of being next to harmful content that they would not wish to be associated with.
“Reducing that hateful content from being seen is one of the best examples how X is committed to encouraging healthy behavior online,” she said. “And today, I can confidently sit in front of you and say that 99.9 percent of all posted impressions are healthy.”
Ms. Yaccarino added that X’s safety team (“hands on keyboards monitoring all day, every day”) is focused on ensuring that the 99.9 percent of healthy impressions figure remains at that number.
“Freedom of speech, not reach basically means that if it is lawful, but it’s awful, it’s extraordinarily difficult for you to see it on Twitter,” she explained.
‘Healthy Debate and Discourse’
While Ms. Yaccarino played up the platform’s safety features and sought to portray it as a place where brands should feel comfortable marketing their products and services, she also made a point about free speech sometimes being inherently uncomfortable.
“We want to make it a healthy debate and discourse. But free expression at its core, will really … only survive when someone you don’t agree with says something you don’t agree with,” she said.
She said labeling people as “good or bad” and canceling them from the platform is at odds with the freedom of speech, not reach approach. Rather, she said she hopes to see X become a space where “healthy, constructive discourse amongst people that we don’t agree with” can thrive.
At the same time, in a nod to advertisers, Ms. Yaccarino said X is “doubling down on brand safety.”
This prompted a question from the interviewer about X owner Elon Musk and whether his insistence on expressing his sometimes controversial views on the platform makes her job of attracting advertising dollars “impossible.”
“It definitely does not make my job impossible,” Ms. Yaccarino said. “It fuels more of an ambition for my job to make sure that everyone, including Elon, is entitled to their own opinion.”
In asking that question, the interviewer referred to an interview CNBC reporter David Faber held with Mr. Musk, in which Mr. Faber challenged the purposefulness of Mr. Musk’s penchant for posting sometimes controversial viewpoints.
“You do some tweets that seem to be … conspiracy theories,” Mr. Faber said in the mid-May interview.
“Well, yes but I mean honestly … some of these conspiracy theories have turned out to be true,” Mr. Musk replied. “Like the Hunter Biden laptop.”
After Mr. Faber conceded that this was “true,” Mr. Musk elaborated on the scandalous suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by Twitter and other social media platforms.
“That was a pretty big deal. … Twitter and others engaged in acts of suppression of information that was relevant to the public. That’s a terrible thing that happened. That’s election interference,” he said.
Polling showed that a staggering 79 percent of voters said they think President Donald Trump would have won reelection in 2020 if voters had been aware of the truth that the Hunter Biden laptop was true and not “Russian disinformation,” as suggested by a group of former intelligence community professionals in a controversial open letter that was widely disseminated by left-leaning media outlets, which pushed the narrative that the laptop was fake.
Mr. Faber pressed Mr. Musk on a controversial tweet in which he compared billionaire financier George Soros to the comic book arch-villain Magneto.
“He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity,” Mr. Musk said in his tweet.
Asked about it by the reporter, Mr. Musk said he stood by this opinion and suggested that the reaction to his posting his views is overblown.
“Calm down people, let’s not make a federal case out of it,” Mr. Musk said of the online outrage expressed over the tweet in some circles.
Pressed on whether he hadn’t considered the impact of his controversial tweets on the bottom lines of companies he helms (as advertisers might turn away) Mr. Musk said he refuses to be silenced by the threat of dwindling profits.
“I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it,” he said in the interview with Mr. Faber.
“This is freedom of speech,” Mr. Musk replied. “I’m allowed to say what I want to say.”
‘Pretty Close to Break Even’
In her interview, Ms. Yaccarino stood by her boss’s insistence on speaking freely while insisting that brands are more protected on X thanks to brand safety tools and capabilities that have been put in place since Mr. Musk took over the platform last October.
At the same time, she said brands are increasingly coming around to the notion that the platform is a public square where different viewpoints intersect rather than Mr. Musk’s personal soapbox.
“I think what brands are getting more and more reminded of is the platform is not about a particular person’s tweets. It’s about the vibrancy, and the half a billion users who are on the platform, and what that represents as opportunities for them,” she said.
Asked about the platform’s financial performance, Ms. Yaccarino said that it’s “pretty close to break even,” and after a period of cost-cutting that saw the workforce shrink from around 8,000 to 1,500 staffers, it’s now refocused on growth.
“Growth means hiring,” she said.
Finally, asked about the much-hyped cage match between Mr. Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, she said she’s not sure if it will really happen but if it does, it will be a “great brand sponsorship opportunity.”
From The Epoch Times