On Wednesday evening, X CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared onstage at the Code Conference with frustration and protest. \u201cI think many people in this room were not fully prepared for me to still come out on the stage,\u201d she told interviewer Julia Boorstin, senior media and tech correspondent at CNBC.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Yaccarino sounded rattled. She\u2019d found out earlier in the day that Kara Swisher, a Code Conference co-founder, had booked a surprise guest to appear an hour before her: Yoel Roth, Twitter\u2019s former head of trust and safety. He has been an outspoken critic of the direction Elon Musk has taken the site.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In his interview with Swisher, Roth recounted how Musk put him personally in danger. Musk suggested on Twitter that Roth had advocated for sexualizing children \u2014 a completely unfounded claim \u2014 which led to death threats and his address being posted online. \u201cI had to sell my house. I had to move,\u201d Roth said. He encouraged Yaccarino to think about how Musk could turn on her, too, and said the site was bleeding users and advertisers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
These criticisms are nothing new, but Yaccarino was visibly bothered by having to appear shortly after a well-known critic of her company. \u201cI\u2019d be happy to respond,\u201d Yaccarino said. \u201cI think I\u2019ve been given about 45 minutes [of notice].\u201d The conference\u2019s 300-some-seat ballroom was packed for her appearance; I caught Swisher reclining on a couch in the back before things kicked off, waiting to see the results of her surprise play out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cI work at X, he worked at Twitter.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Throughout the interview, Yaccarino repeated that she\u2019s only been on the job at X for 12 weeks, as if to say there\u2019s only so much she could have done by now. But in that time, she\u2019s managed to do one thing consistently: dismiss concerns about X, whether it\u2019s the platform\u2019s disinvestment in moderation or Musk\u2019s chaotic leadership.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Her dismissive stance was very much on display Wednesday night. She wrote off Roth\u2019s claims about the platform\u2019s performance as outdated (\u201cI work at X, he worked at Twitter,\u201d she said); she said the Anti-Defamation League \u2014 which Musk is threatening to sue \u2014 pays too much attention to the antisemitism on X and not enough to the improvements the platform has made; and she argued that despite the panic around advertisers fleeing, most<\/em> of the big ones are coming back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n These were not satisfying answers if you\u2019re a person who thinks Musk is destroying Twitter or stoking harassment. But they were, for the most part, confident answers. Yaccarino answered slowly and carefully, and she seemed determined to push the complaints aside as collateral damage for reinventing the platform.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cX is a new company building a foundation based on free expression and freedom of speech,\u201d she said at the start.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe talk about everything.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Boorstin prodded Yaccarino for hard numbers on how X is doing amid all these crises. Yaccarino said the company would be profitable \u201cin early \u201924.\u201d The platform has 200\u2013250 million daily active users. \u201cSomething like that,\u201d Yaccarino said. She went to check her phone, as if to confirm the number but never finished checking. Later, she suggested that X has 540 million monthly active users and 225 million daily active users. (That would be slightly down from the 238 million daily users Twitter had before the acquisition.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was hard to know whether Yaccarino wasn\u2019t prepared enough or if she simply didn\u2019t want to give definitive answers. At one point, Boorstin asked about Musk\u2019s recent statement that X will eventually charge all users to post on the platform, and Yaccarino appeared unable to speak to the proposed change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cCan you repeat?\u201d Yaccarino asked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cElon Musk announced you\u2019re moving to an entirely subscription-based service,\u201d Boorstin said. \u201cNothing free about using X.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDid he say we were moving to it specifically or is thinking about it?\u201d Yaccarino asked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe said that\u2019s the plan,\u201d Boorstin said. \u201cDid he consult you before he announced that?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe talk about everything,\u201d Yaccarino said. She never clarified X\u2019s plans.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The interview was filled with rocky moments like this, but Yaccarino didn\u2019t run. As the clock ran out on the interview, Boorstin said she would let Yaccarino stay as long as she wanted \u2014 and Yaccarino took her up on it. Even when Yaccarino finally said she needed to leave, she stuck around for a few more questions. At close to 40 minutes, it was the longest interview of the conference.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was a long conversation and a far more complicated one than Yaccarino may have wanted to have. At the top of the interview, she tried to push aside concerns about X with a statement of confidence. \u201cIt\u2019s a new day at X, and I\u2019ll leave it at that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But it could never be that simple. As long as Musk is in the mix, she\u2019ll always need more time to explain whatever\u2019s going on at X.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] On Wednesday evening, X CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared onstage at the Code Conference with frustration and protest. \u201cI think many people in this room were not fully prepared for me to still come out on the stage,\u201d she told interviewer Julia Boorstin, senior media and tech correspondent at CNBC. Yaccarino sounded rattled. She\u2019d found …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}