Linda Yaccarino has tweeted for the primary few instances since Elon Musk named her as Twitter’s subsequent CEO on Friday.
On Saturday, she began off by thanking Musk, including, “I’ve lengthy been impressed by your imaginative and prescient to create a brighter future. I’m excited to assist convey this imaginative and prescient to Twitter and rework this enterprise collectively!”
Subsequent, she wrote, “I see I’ve some new followers. I’m not as prolific as @elonmusk (but!), however I’m simply as dedicated to the way forward for this platform. Your suggestions is VITAL to that future. I’m right here for all of it. Let’s hold the dialog going and construct Twitter 2.0 collectively!”
These two tweets—and particularly the primary one—shortly racked up essentially the most views, likes, and replies her account has ever seen, an indication of the sharply elevated consideration Yaccarino will obtain as she tries to show across the firm’s fortunes.
One among her hottest tweets earlier than this weekend concerned, considerably fittingly, Musk. On April 20, she shared an interview with Musk she’d simply carried out at a Potential advertising and marketing convention in Florida, writing: “We are able to all agree … this freedom of speech, deserves a bit extra attain. Right here’s my full chat with @elonmusk…”
That interview was carried out in entrance of selling professionals, a lot of whom had grow to be leery of promoting on Twitter since Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the platform final 12 months. Yaccarino challenged Musk in that interview repeatedly, prodding the self-described “free-speech absolutist” to handle the considerations of the advertisers watching them relating to a perceived uptick in racism, conspiracies, and different objectionable content material on the platform.
“So let me type of pull you again into what’s necessary to the folks on this room, and that’s safety for his or her advert campaigns,” Yaccarino advised Musk. She stated there must be a possibility for these advertising and marketing professionals to “affect what you’re constructing.”
Musk replied, “If I have been to say, sure, you possibly can affect me, that will be improper, that will be very improper, as a result of that will be a diminishment of freedom of speech.”
“I wanna be particular about affect,” replied Yaccarino, who was then nonetheless an NBCUniversal advert government. “It’s extra an open suggestions loop for the promoting consultants on this room to assist develop Twitter into a spot the place they are going to be enthusiastic about investing extra money: product growth, advert security, content material moderation. That’s what the affect is.”
“It’s completely cool to say you need your promoting to seem in sure locations in Twitter and never somewhere else,” Musk stated. “However it’s not cool to attempt to say what Twitter will do. And if which means dropping promoting {dollars}, we lose it. However freedom of speech is paramount.”
The interview may have grow to be tense given the subject and the back-and-forth, however Yaccarino and Musk appeared to have a rapport. She capably pulled off a balancing act that day between advertisers and the mercurial billionaire. It may need been a warm-up for what’s to come back.
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