The first day on the job is always a challenge—get to know the people you’ll be working with, make a good impression, and, if you’re new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, put out a growing cluster of fires that threaten to burn the place down.
Yaccarino, who assumes Twitter’s nominally top job today—owner and erstwhile CEO Elon Musk will of course be hanging over her shoulder—should be the perfect person to play firefighter in this case. As global ad chief at NBCUniversal, she was in charge of handling advertisers, and they’re the biggest problem facing Twitter right now.
According to the New York Times, U.S. ad revenue is down 59% year on year. Given that ad revenue accounts for almost all of Twitter’s income, it’s no surprise that the company’s worth has plummeted by around two-thirds since Musk began his erratic reign.
So that’s the overarching problem Yaccarino has to deal with. However, bringing those advertisers back will mean undoing the damage that has scared them away. To that end, here’s a quick rundown of Yaccarino’s four most urgent tasks:
1) Focus on making Twitter safer and more trustworthy. The platform has never been the safest space, but hate speech and misinformation have thrived under Musk’s leadership. Nobody wants to advertise against either of those things, and they certainly don’t want to fall victim to impersonation under a paid-verification-but-with-no-real-authentication system. Last week’s resignations of trust and safety chief Ella Irwin and brand safety exec A.J. Brown were blaring sirens. Their replacements need to have confidence that the CEO has their backs if they do their jobs right. And European regulators need to be urgently convinced that Twitter is taking disinformation seriously—because if not, they’re going to come down on the company like a ton of bricks when the Digital Services Act (which allows fines of up to 6% of global revenue) starts applying to Twitter in a few months’ time.
2) Make Twitter neutral-ish again. Was Twitter too lefty before Musk? That’s debatable, but what’s not is that Musk has seemed only interested in pleasing more right-wing users over recent months. Naked partisanship is not attractive to most users nor to advertisers—and it would create all sorts of crises as the U.S. heads into an election. Twitter needs to reposition itself as being broadly welcoming, and not a service that’s tipping the scales one way or another.
3) Stability, please. Musk’s heavy layoffs definitely made Twitter less technically stable, as evidenced not just by features that flicker in and out of functionality (like tweet translation), but also by last month’s glitch-plagued launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential run. Yaccarino needs to get all that in order—but, just as important, she needs to demonstrate stable leadership. Musk’s relentless pursuit of his whims and notions has provided good rubbernecking fodder, but enough already.
4) Think globally again. For all of Musk’s libertarian, free-speech rhetoric, Twitter has under his leadership been incredibly ready to cave into authoritarian pressure outside the U.S. In India, it blocked posts relating to a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ahead of the Turkish election, it effectively lent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan some support by censoring opposition accounts. If Twitter is going for global growth, it needs to be trustworthy.
If Yaccarino can pull off the above, then Twitter will be well positioned to both survive and perhaps morph into that X everything-app that Musk seems to want. If not, its decline will continue, possibly at speed. No pressure, then.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
