Linda Yaccarino announced yesterday the arrival of “Twitter 2.0″. In her first memo to her employees, the new CEO of the social network promised that the company will be “the most accurate source of information in the world”. And he put as much epic on it as he could: “literally anything is possible,” “let’s build something new from the ground up,” “a new future.” But Yaccarino knows that, beyond the initial optimism, he has to run to put out several fires.
It comes to Twitter almost eight months after Elon Musk bought and began running the company. And with that, chaos. The social network went from having almost 8,000 employees in October to just 1,500. At least 50 of the top 100 advertisers they said they wanted abandon ship, hate speech skyrocketed and not to mention the twists and turns that have affected the operation of the platform. Does anyone remember when the tweets from Musk appeared all the time? Or when the Twitter logo changed to Dogecoin?
“We will do a lot of silly things in the next few months. We will keep what works and change what doesn’t,” Musk, also the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, had warned in November. The mogul has said that he will continue to oversee the product and engineering teams, while Yaccarino will take care of everything else.
Yaccarino is, above all, a media professional. She comes from being the Head of Advertising and Partnerships at NBC Universal. It seems to have the right profile to win back the trust of advertisers, or at least to try. It is one of the five great challenges that she has to face as the new CEO of Twitter.
1. The new CEO of Twitter, on the hunt for advertisers
Elon Musk said in April that the company was “almost breaking even.” He also assured that most of the advertisers were returning. but the signature Insider Intelligence predicted that same month that Twitter’s global ad revenue will fall this year to $2.98 billion. This would represent a decrease of 28%, compared to what was achieved in 2022.
The New York Times posted last week that Twitter ad sales fell 59% in Aprilcompared to the same period in 2022. The social network has regularly been below its weekly sales projections in the United States, sometimes by as much as 30%, according to an internal document accessed by the American outlet.
That is why Yaccarino must hurry. 90% of Twitter’s money inflow comes from the advertising business. Musk told The Wall Street Journal last month that the company was not profitable, but he was confident it could be cash flow positive by June.
2. Moderation and hate speech
Yaccarino bought into Musk’s idea of turning the social network into a “banner” of free speech. In the mogul’s terms, this means less restraint. “The global city square needs a transformation,” the new CEO of Twitter said in the letter to her employees. She thinks it’s necessary “Advance civilization through unfiltered information sharing and open dialogue.”
One of the first things Musk did when he took control was to reactivate the accounts of well-known users suspended for posting hate messages. Among them, the misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate and Kanye West, who soon after published a Nazi swastika. This was only the starting point.
The tweets anti-Semites, in general, doubled. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an organization dedicated to investigating disinformation and hate campaigns around the world, also showed that misogynistic accounts grew 69% since last year.
Although Musk has wanted to downplay it, advertisers are not amused. Hate speech and pornography are top concerns for the social network’s sales team, workers and former workers told The New York Times.
the coalition #StopToxicTwittera group of more than 60 non-governmental organizations, has been campaigning since last year for major advertisers on Twitter to Demand a safe, hate-free platform for your brands. “They are trying to destroy free speech in America,” Musk complained in November in response.
3. Twitter, in the crosshairs of European law
On the one hand, advertisers. On the other hand, the law. Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, warned Twitter that it had to move “towards full compliance with the Digital Services Act” of the European Union (EU).
Twitter was classified at the end of April as a “very large online platform”, in accordance with the provisions of this legislation. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google and Wikipedia, among others, also fall into this category. As of that announcement, these companies had four months to adjust to the requirements of the rule. “The countdown has begun” Breton said at the time.
Twitter is expected to undergo a stress test this month to determine how well it complies with the law. This exam is voluntary and, for now, carries no fines nor other formal consequences.
Breton has said that the company has to implement transparent user policies, significantly strengthen content moderation and protect freedom of expression. If Twitter does not comply, it is exposed to fines of up to 6% of global billing. And, in extreme cases, to a temporary suspension of the service in the EU.
4. The new competition
The crisis is being taken advantage of by the competition. Bluesky was originally a proposed protocol for Twitter by its co-founder, Jack Dorse, outside the company since 2021. The project is described by Dorse as “an open decentralized standard for social media». Prior to Musk’s arrival, Bluesky parted ways with Twitter and now plays as an alternative.
You have to join a waiting list or receive an invitation to use Bulesky. Nearly 1.2 million people were on the waiting list in Aprilreported Forbes. And the demand for invitations was so high that people were auctioning them off on eBay for hundreds of dollars.
But the biggest blow may be yet to come. Last week the image of the prototype of a “new Twitter” designed by Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. It would work as a standalone app, based on the Instagram platform. The idea was presented by one of Meta’s top executives to a group of employees.
They call it “Project 92” internally, but its public name could be ThreadsDevelopment of the app began in January and Meta wants to make it available “as soon as we can,” the company’s product manager Chris Cox said, according to The Verge.
5. The biggest challenge for the new CEO of Twitter: dealing with Elon Musk
And yes, the new CEO of Twitter has to, above all things, learn to deal with the leadership of Elon Musk, who in recent months has confirmed that he can be quite unpredictable and erratic.
There are several who have not been able to with him. In early June, Twitter’s Vice President of Trust and Safety, Ella Irwin, resigned. Her main responsibility was monitor policies on harassment, hate speech and violent content. Sources inside the company had said that Irwin was one of Musk’s most esteemed directors. With everything and that, she only lasted a few months in office.
Irwin was the second Trust and Security chief to resign since Musk took over. The first, Yoel Roth, left the company in November 2022. The head of brand security and advertising quality, AJ Brown, another key player in content moderation, also left the team in recent days.
The enthusiasm, for now, overflows. “We have to think big. We need to transform ourselves,” Yaccarino said in his first memo as Twitter CEO. “And we can do it all by starting from first principles: by questioning our assumptions and building something new from scratch.” Thus begins Twitter 2.0.