New Twitter CEO Wants Platform to Become ‘Most Accurate’ News Source

Facts

• On Monday, new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who took over from owner Elon Musk last week, announced she wants the social media site to become the "most accurate real-time information source" worldwide.¹
• In her first memo to employees, which she also posted on Twitter, Yaccarino laid out her vision for "Twitter 2.0," saying she aims for the social media site to reshape the "global town square" of communication.²
• She also hopes the site will advance civilization by giving people the freedom to engage in an "unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue" on the microblogging platform.³
• Yaccarino will mainly focus on Twitter’s business operations, according to a statement Musk posted on the platform last month.⁴
• Yaccarino, formerly chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, joined Twitter as its new CEO on June 6.⁵
• This announcement comes after The New York Times reported last week that Twitter's US advertising revenue dropped 59% to $88M in the weeks between April 1 and the first week of May compared to a year earlier.⁶

Sources: ¹Al Jazeera, ²Business Insider, ³Verge, ⁴FOX News, ⁵CNN, and ⁶New York Times.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by The Drum. Musk knows he must make Twitter profitable again, and choosing Yaccarino as CEO is one of his smartest moves yet. Yaccarino’s ascension has been lauded by advertisers, who will flock back to Twitter if she succeeds in winning back user and business trust in the platform.
• Narrative B, as provided by Common Dreams. It’s hypocritical for Yaccarino to pledge to turn Twitter into the world's most accurate news source, while Musk has opened the platform to conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists, and thousands of accounts that were previously banned. Add Musk’s erosion of long-standing content moderation used to fight against disinformation, and Yaccarino is clearly being set up to fail.

Predictions